NASA has restored contact with the Martian Ingenuity helicopter, after more than two months of radio silence, the US space agency said Friday.
The small rotorcraft, which began a journey to the Red Planet with the Perseverance probe in early 2021, has outlasted its initial thirty-day mission to prove the feasibility of its technology on five test flights, reports Al-Rai daily.
Since then, the helicopter has been used dozens of times, serving as an atmospheric scout to help a mobile robot 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 launched on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California lost contact with it as it descended to the surface after its two-minute flight at an altitude of 363 meters.
The loss of communications was expected, due to the presence of a hill between the Ingenuity helicopter and the Perseverance mobile robot, which acts as a link between the drone and the ground.
However, Joshua Anderson, the team leader responsible for Ingenuity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told AFP, “This was the longest time we went without hearing from Ingenuity during the mission.”
He added, “Ingenuity is designed to be able to act as it should when gaps in communication like these occur, but we naturally feel comfortable when we reconnect with it.” This is not the first time that Perseverance has encountered communication problems.
Read Today's News TODAY... on our Telegram Channel click here to join and receive all the latest updates t.me/thetimeskuwait
