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After more than two months of radio quiet, the brave Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has once again made communication with NASA, the space agency announced on Friday.
The small rotorcraft, which travelled to Mars in early 2021 alongside the Perseverance rover, has already outlasted its planned 30-day mission to demonstrate the viability of its technology in five test flights.
Since then, it has been launched dozens of times, serving as an aerial scout to help its wheeled partner look for evidence of prehistoric microbial life from billions of years ago, when Mars was more wetter and warmer than it is now.
On April 26, the 52nd Ingenuity flight was scheduled to take off, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California lost communication with the spacecraft as it fell to the surface after its two-minute, 1,191-foot (363-meter) bounce.
Given that a hill stood between Ingenuity and Perseverance, the relay that connects the drone to Earth, and the drone, it was feared that communications would be lost.
However, Joshua Anderson, Ingenuity team head at JPL, told AFP that “this has been the longest we’ve gone without hearing from Ingenuity so far in the mission.”
“Ingenuity is designed to take care of itself when communication breakdowns like this occur, but we all had a sense of relief finally hearing back,” says one person.
The heli seems to be in fine shape based on the data so far. Ingenuity will be ready to take off on its next trip, heading westward towards a rocky outcrop the Perseverance team is interested in examining, if additional health tests likewise turn out to be unremarkable.
Downed communications have occurred at Ingenuity before. In a blog post, chief engineer Travis Brown described the period of time the heli was absent in April as “an agonisingly long time,” during which it was searching an old river delta.
