Helicopter on Mars calls home after lengthy communications blackout – Spaceflight Now

NASA engineers are preparing the miniature Mars helicopter Ingenuity for its 53rd flight to the surface of the Red Planet after re-establishing contact following a two-month radio blackout.

The silence was due to a Martian hill blocking line-of-sight communications with the Perseverance rover, which serves as a conduit between the helicopter and ground controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

Ingenuity, the first craft to ever fly over the surface of another planet, made aerial reconnaissance flights above the Martian surface seem almost routine. It undertook its last mission on 26 April, but contact was lost at the end of the flight of 1,191 feet (363 meters) 139 seconds.

The loss of communications after one of the previous six days of the same month had been anticipated, and the Ingenuity team had already developed recontact plans for when the rover was back in range.

After painstaking waiting, Ingenuity’s 52nd flight was officially recorded as a success when contact was re-established on 28 June after Perseverance cleared the hill and was able to see Ingenuity again.

Our goal is to keep Ingenuity ahead of Perseverance and that occasionally involves temporarily pushing the boundaries of communication,” said Josh Anderson, relieved by the Ingenuity team leader, after announcing that contact had been re-established.

The part of Jezero crater that the rover and helicopter are currently exploring has very rough terrain, making it more likely that communications will be disrupted.

After 63 days and with the flight now officially registered as a success, the attention of Ingenuity controllers is focused on a series of health checks in view of Flight 53 which could take place within the next two weeks.

The target is a temporary area to the west, from which the team intends to make another flight westward to a new base of operations near a rocky outcrop that the Perseverance team is interested in exploring, Anderson added.

The helicopter’s first flight to Mars took place on April 19, 2021, about two months after landing in the Jezero crater attached to the Perseverance rover. It has since far exceeded its originally planned technology demonstration mission of just five flights.

Ingenuity is the first machine to achieve powered flight across the skies of an alien world, a significant achievement given the thin Martian atmosphere that makes elevator access difficult. To overcome this it features enlarged and specially shaped blades that spin 10 times faster than it takes to fly on Earth.

At first, engineers hoped that Ingenuity would be able to demonstrate that a solar-powered drone could operate in Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere, but the experiment ended up vastly exceeding expectations, and the craft is no longer a simple technology demonstrator, but has become an integral part of Perseverance’s operations.

The craft, which weighs four pounds (1.8 kg), serves as an aerial scout for Perseverance, who are looking for evidence of past microbial life and collecting samples for future return to Earth.

Its successful test of powered flight to another world is paving the way for more advanced robotic helicopters to better examine Mars’ surface and atmospheric conditions, and could also aid sample return missions in the future. Red.