Washington: The official mission logbook now lists the Ingenuity Mars helicopter’s 52nd flight as a success. The trip took place on April 26 but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California lost contact with the helicopter as it slid toward the surface of Mars for a landing.
The Perseverance rover was in a different area from where the helicopter landed, thus the Ingenuity team anticipated a communication failure due to the slope of the path. Between JPL mission controllers and the helicopter, the rover acts as a radio relay. Prior to this communication failure, the Ingenuity team had developed a reconnection strategy for when the rover would return within communication range.
When Perseverance reached the top of the hill on June 28 and saw Ingenuity again, contact was reestablished, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in an article on its website. Flight 52 was designed to reposition the helicopter and photograph the Martian terrain for the rover’s research team. It was 1,191 feet (363 m) in length and lasted 139 seconds.
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“The portion of Jezero Crater that the rover and helicopter are currently exploring has a lot of rough terrain, making communications more likely to stop,” said JPL’s Josh Anderson, Ingenuity team lead. “The team’s goal is to keep Ingenuity ahead of Perseverance, which sometimes involves temporarily moving beyond communication ranges. We are excited to be back in communication range with Ingenuity and receive confirmation of Flight 52.”
Although 63 days is a long time to wait for flight results, the data coming in suggests that all is well with the first aircraft on Second Earth. If the results of the rest of Ingenuity’s health tests remain similarly positive, the helicopter could be flying in the sky again in a few weeks.
The crew intends to make another flight westward, to a new base of operations closer to a rocky area they are interested in checking from the interim airstrip to the west where Flight 53 intends to arrive. Is.