NASA restores contact with Creativity Helicopter on Mars

(CNN) – After 63 days of silence, the Martian Creativity Helicopter is speaking again.

The small helicopter took to the skies over Mars on April 26 on its 52nd flight, but lost contact with mission controllers before landing, causing a month-long communications outage.

But ingenuity Call home again on June 28, to assuage any potential concerns about the safety and whereabouts of the first airship on another planet. However, it is still too long for humans here on Earth to confirm that Creativity has landed safely.

The purpose of the flight was to change the position of the helicopter and take pictures of the surface of Mars.

The mission team expected a communications outage.

That’s because the Ingenuity helicopter communicates with mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and relays all messages via the Perseverance rover.

And when creativity kicked off on Flight 52, the hill formed an obstacle preventing the helicopter and rover from communicating with each other.

“The part of Jezero crater that the rover and helicopter are currently exploring has a lot of rough terrain, which makes a communications outage more likely,” Josh Anderson, JPL creative team leader, said in a statement.

While the two robots make a dynamic duo that can scout Mars from its surface and atmosphere for signs of ancient life, it’s hard for them to stick together.

The role of dexterity as an air scout

The creation began as a technology demonstration to test whether a small helicopter could fly on Mars. After exceeding all expectations on five successful flights in the spring of 2021, Ingenuity has moved on to becoming an airborne explorer, ahead of the Perseverance rover and charting safe and scientifically interesting paths for rover exploration.

Sometimes, creativity explores and depicts places a rover might not reach for weeks.

Once Perseverance reached the top of the obstructive hill, the helicopter and rover had a chance to communicate and transmit Ingenuity’s messages back to Earth, including data captured during its 139-second flight on April 26 that covered a distance of 363 meters.

Ingenuity’s navigation camera captured the helicopter’s shadow on the surface of Mars during its Expedition 52 on April 26. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“The goal of a team is to keep creativity ahead of perseverance, which sometimes means temporarily pushing beyond the boundaries of communication,” Anderson said.

“We are excited to be back in range of communications with ingenuity and to receive confirmation of Flight 52.”

What’s next for creativity and perseverance?

This isn’t the first time the mission team has experienced outages in communication with Ingenuity that lasted “an excruciatingly long period,” such as the outages that occurred before the helicopter’s historic 50th flight in April, according to Travis Brown, Ingenuity’s chief engineer. at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The helicopter is also dealing with a build-up of dust on its solar panel that occurred during the Martian winter, causing the helicopter to experience a “transition energy state” that can persist even into the Martian summer.

“It means that, to your team’s dismay, we still haven’t finished playing this high-stakes game of hide-and-seek with the hilarious little chopper,” Brown Books on the NASA blog.

But Creativity succeeded in that by landing on Mars, surviving the cold nights, flying to Mars for the first time, and making many record-breaking flights since then, its journey to explore Mars is unprecedented.

Flight engineers are already planning another flight of the helicopter in a couple of weeks, hoping that the rest of the Ingenuity system looks to be in good shape. Ingenuity’s upcoming flights will bring it closer to the rocky ledge that NASA is keen to explore with its Perseverance rover.