The mini-helicopter has already greater than survived the unique 30-day mission.
Very long time no phrase: NASA has re-established contact with the intrepid Ingenuity Mars helicopter after greater than two months of radio silence, the house company mentioned Friday.
The mini-helicopter, which hitchhiked to the Crimson Planet on the Perseverance rover in early 2021, has already greater than survived its preliminary 30-day mission to show the feasibility of its expertise in 5 check flights.
Since then, it has been deployed dozens of instances as an aerial reconnaissance to assist its wheeled companion seek for indicators of historical microbial life from billions of years in the past, when Mars was a lot wetter and hotter than it’s immediately.
Ingenuity’s 52nd flight launched on April 26, however mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California misplaced contact because it descended to the floor after its two-minute, 363-meter bounce.
The lack of communication was anticipated, as there was a hill between Ingenuity and Perseverance, which acts as a relay between the drone and Earth.
Nonetheless, “that is the longest we have gone into the mission up to now with out listening to from Ingenuity,” Joshua Anderson, Ingenuity crew chief at JPL, advised AFP.
“Ingenuity was designed to deal with itself when communication gaps like this occur, however all of us nonetheless had a way of aid once we lastly heard one thing.”
Knowledge thus far signifies that the helicopter is in good situation. If additional well being checks are additionally again to regular, Ingenuity shall be all set for its subsequent run, westward to a rock that the Perseverance crew needs to discover.
It isn’t the primary time Ingenuity has skilled a communication breakdown. The chopper was looking an historical river delta when it went lacking in April for about six days, “an excruciatingly very long time,” chief engineer Travis Brown wrote in a weblog publish.
