NASA has lost contact with the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars
NASA has lost contact with the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars
The dropout occurred on Thursday (Jan. 18), during Ingenuity's 72nd Red Planet flight.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Let's say the worst case is true and the helicopter is dead. I can't get over the fact that they managed 72 flights remote controlling it from another planet!
"remote control" even less than the rover itself. It is a pre-defined flight path. There is no control during the flight. Let me copy from wiki:
It proved that flight was possible on other planets without the direct human control that the finite speed of light makes impractical (depending on the positions of the two planets, radio signals take between 5 and 20 minutes to travel between the Earth and Mars).[13] As a result of this delay Ingenuity must autonomously perform the maneuvers planned, scripted and transmitted to it by its operators.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
"Data Ingenuity sent to the Perseverance rover (which acts as a relay between the helicopter and Earth) during the flight indicates it successfully climbed to its assigned maximum altitude of 40 feet (12 meters)," NASA officials wrote in an update on Friday (Jan. 19).
Ingenuity and Perseverance landed together in February 2021 on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, which harbored a big lake and a river delta billions of years ago.
Perseverance is hunting for evidence of past Mars life and collecting samples for future return to Earth.
Ingenuity is serving as a scout for the car-sized rover, on an extended mission that NASA granted after the little chopper aced its original five-flight technology-demonstrating campaign in the spring of 2021.
"Perseverance is currently out of line-of-sight with Ingenuity, but the team could consider driving closer for a visual inspection," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages both robots' missions, said via X on Friday.
We'll have to wait and see if Ingenuity's handlers can get back in touch with the pioneering chopper, the first vehicle ever to explore the skies of a world beyond Earth.
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