Every day that Ingenuity is still there is like a small miracle. The helicopter that NASA sent to Mars as a unique companion to the Perseverance rover was, above all, an experiment. Space agency scientists did not expect it to make more than three flights. It has ten times as long, has survived the terrifying winter on Mars, and has kept on flying despite everything. These days he has given us quite a scare.
flying i go. In flights 46 and 47 they took Ingenuity to the so-called Tenby Region, a “scientifically important” area in which the helicopter served as usual as an outpost for the Perseverance rover. The captured images “were unfortunately of little practical value”, but on Flight 48 things changed and Ingenuity flew over other areas called Castell Henllys and Foel Drygarn. Those images were of great value, and allowed us to prepare the Perseverance journey for two weeks.
The helicopter was located in the green dot, and the rover with a red one in places where communication was not possible. The yellow dot shows Perseverance’s position just before Ingenuity Flight 50. Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Ingenuity no responde. After that success, NASA engineers made a new flight, on 49, after a couple of failed attempts, so that Ingenuity would approach the southern wall of the Belva crater, but something happened after managing to download the images captured by the helicopter. Suddenly Ingenuity stopped responding. What was happening?
six dying suns. Martian solar days, called “suns” without further ado, are slightly longer than Earth days: they last 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds. And sun after sun, Ingenuity gave no signal. They had already experienced problems “wake-up” Ingenuity on the Sol 685 mission date, so they weren’t entirely alarmed. Now that Sol 755 was fulfilled, the idea was to try to contact him methodically. The problem was not just with Ingenuity, but with Perseverance.
communicative shadow. The rover had moved to study an area to the southeast of Castell Henllys, and this caused it to be in a bad position to be able to communicate with Ingenuity. NASA was ordering it to move to Foel Drygarn, closer to the helicopter, but there was still no signal. That’s where the stress began, and it was not clear to the space agency that they could recover the signal.
almost seven days in silence. Finally on Sol 761, almost a week after losing the signal, the communications team received an ACK (radio received signal confirmation). The same thing happened the next day, and they finally discovered the problem, that there were two of them. The first, that the topology between the rover and the helicopter made it difficult for the radio signals used between these vehicles to be transmitted. The second, that Ingenuity’s HBS antenna is located in its lower right part, something that can make communications difficult in these conditions.
I’m whistling. After completing its analysis of Foel Drygarn, NASA sent the Perseverance rover toward the site of Perseverance’s last landing. They risked Perseverance going too far and entering terrain not previously explored by the helicopter, but everything went well.
Flight 50 with record included. The engineers were able to send the new flight plan to Ingenuity, which ended up making its 50th flight successfully, covering a distance of 300 meters and reaching an altitude of 18 meters, the highest to date. The next morning, Sol 763, NASA received full flight telemetry, which meant that once again Ingenuity was alive and well. The flight history shows in fact a flight 51, carried out on April 22, but since then there have been no new routes.
The hiding will continue (fortunately). Even so, at NASA they explained that although Martian summer is now here, Ingenuity’s solar panels are quite dusty and that will cause the helicopter to go into energy saving mode often. “This means that, much to the chagrin of your team, we’re not done playing hide-and-seek with the little helicopter yet,” they concluded. A game, yes, that for now is always having a happy ending.
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