NASA’s little helicopter on Mars has logged its last flight

NASA’s little helicopter on Mars has logged its last flight

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s little Mars helicopter has flown its last flight.

The space agency announced Thursday that the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) chopper named Ingenuity can no longer fly because of rotor blade damage. While it remains upright and in contact with flight controllers, its $85 million mission is officially over, officials said.

Originally intended as a short-term tech demo, Ingenuity logged 72 flights over three years at Mars. It accumulated more than two hours of flight time, traveling 11 miles (18 kilometers). That's more than 14 times farther than planned, according to NASA. It soared as high as 79 feet (24 meters) and hit speeds of up to 22.4 mph (36 kph).

"While we knew this day was inevitable, it doesn’t make it any easier” to announce the end of the mission, said NASA's Lori Glaze. “It’s almost an understatement to say that it has surpassed expectations.”

Asian supermarket T&T to open at Polo Park

Live seafood, more than 150 varieties of baked bread and rows of Asian produce are being promised for CF Polo Park — in two years time.

Time-travel mystery a hallucinogenic trip

Here’s a spooky premise: A fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, that disappeared along with its crew 30 years ago, makes a mysterious return — empty but unchanged — to a small village in Cornwall, on England’s southwest coast.

“She’s back,” the boat’s owner says ominously. Even more ominously, he doesn’t sound particularly surprised. It feels as if this has happened before.

There’s something unsettling going on in this strange and singular film. Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin (Bait, Enys Men) has crafted a ghostly time-travel tale that collapses past and present, leaving his characters — and the audience — in haunting emotional and moral quandaries.

If the film’s sense of time can be deliberately hazy, its sense of place is very clear. All three of Jenkin’s features have been set in Cornwall, and there’s an intimate, immediate sense of connection to this coastal town, which is depressed and dwindling, its inhabitants beset by economic precarity. The harbour is deserted, the pub is empty, shop windows are boarded up and the young people are leaving. It seems as if the disappearance of that boat and crew broke not just the men’s grieving families but the whole community.

Federal government to build $267-M emergency research lab in Winnipeg

The federal government says it will build a $267-million medical countermeasures laboratory in Winnipeg with the goal of preparing Canada for future pandemics or outbreaks.

Expected to open in 2033, the national site will help the country develop vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostic tools, Winnipeg Liberal MP Terry Duguid said.

“This is a big deal for our city and for our province, a big deal for life sciences in Canada,” he told reporters Wednesday. “This facility is going to help protect the nation and help protect the world.”

Ottawa said the site — to be located next to the National Microbiology Laboratory’s Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health on Arlington Street, just north of William Avenue — draws on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic.

New sci-fi/fantasy bookstore a welcome addition

A new chapter has begun in Winnipeg’s literary landscape with the opening of science fiction and fantasy bookstore Other Places Books.

Located at 436 Graham Ave., the queer-owned and operated shop is the latest in a host of genre bookstores to have opened in the city over the last few years. In addition to longtime mainstay Whodunit? Mystery Bookstore (163 Lilac St.), the local scene now also features a horror bookstore (Raven’s End Books, which opened at 1859 Portage Ave. in 2024) and a shop focused on romance (Bound to Please, which opened at 995 McPhillips St. earlier this year).

The 900 titles currently in stock at Other Places, which opened Tuesday, span a range of sci-fi and fantasy sub-genres, with a particular focus on queer writers and storylines. The bookstore is the brainchild of Didi Chanoch, who moved to Winnipeg from Israel in 2025 after the Canadian federal government began offering work permits to those in Israel and Palestine looking to leave the area due to the conflict.

Winnipeg ended up on Chanoch’s radar in large part due to a more reasonable cost of living than other Canadian cities.