At long last, no matter what: NASA has reestablished contact with the intrepid Ingenuity Mars helicopter after more than two months of radio silence, the space agency said on Friday.
The mini rotorcraft, which hitched a ride to the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover in early 2021, has already largely survived its initial 30-day mission to prove the feasibility of its technology in five test flights.
Since then, it has been deployed dozens of times, acting as an aerial scout to assist its wheeled companion.
The search for signs of ancient microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter and warmer than it is today. Ingenuity’s 52nd flight began on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California lost contact as it descended. surface after his two-minute, 1,191-foot (363-metre) jump.
Loss of communication was feared, as a hill stood between Ingenuity and Perseverance, which acts as a relay between the drone and Earth.
Still, “this has been the longest we’ve gone without hearing from Ingenuity so far in the mission,” Joshua Anderson, head of the Ingenuity team at JPL, told AFP. But we all still had a sense of relief to finally hear back.” The data so far indicates that Haley is in good shape.
If further health checks also return normal.
When it arrives, Ingenuity will be all set for its next flight, westward toward a rocky area the Perseverance team is interested in exploring. This isn’t the first time Ingenuity has experienced a communication outage.
Haley was exploring an ancient river delta when he went missing for about six days in April, “an excruciatingly long time,” Chief Engineer Travis Brown wrote in a blog post.
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