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WA: Long time ago, no talking: NASA reconnected with the intrepid cleverness The US space agency said on Friday that the Mars helicopter is after more than two months of radio silence.
The small rotorcraft, which attached a flight to red planet With the Perseverance rover in early 2021, it has already survived its initial 30-day mission to demonstrate the viability of its technology on five test flights.
Since then, he’s been deployed dozens of times, serving as an atmospheric scout to help his wheeled companion search for signs of ancient microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter and warmer than it is today.
Ingenuity Flight 52 launched on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California lost contact as it descended to the surface after a two-minute, 1,191-foot (363-meter) jump.
Loss of communications was to be expected, since the hill stood in between Dexterity and perseverancewhich acts as a relay between the drone and the ground.
However, “This was the longest we’ve gone without hearing from a company ingenuity yet on the mission,” Joshua Anderson, JPL’s chief creative officer, told AFP.
“Creativity is designed to take care of itself when communication gaps like this happen, but we all still have a sense of comfort when we’re heard from again.”
The data so far indicates that the helicopters are in good condition. If other health checks return normal, Ingenuity will be prepared for its next journey, west toward a rocky outcrop that the Perseverance team is interested in exploring.
This is not the first time that creativity has suffered communications failure. The helicopters had been cruising around an ancient river delta when they went missing for about six days in April, “an excruciatingly long time,” Travis Browne, chief engineer, wrote in a blog post.
The small rotorcraft, which attached a flight to red planet With the Perseverance rover in early 2021, it has already survived its initial 30-day mission to demonstrate the viability of its technology on five test flights.
Since then, he’s been deployed dozens of times, serving as an atmospheric scout to help his wheeled companion search for signs of ancient microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter and warmer than it is today.
Ingenuity Flight 52 launched on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California lost contact as it descended to the surface after a two-minute, 1,191-foot (363-meter) jump.
Loss of communications was to be expected, since the hill stood in between Dexterity and perseverancewhich acts as a relay between the drone and the ground.
However, “This was the longest we’ve gone without hearing from a company ingenuity yet on the mission,” Joshua Anderson, JPL’s chief creative officer, told AFP.
“Creativity is designed to take care of itself when communication gaps like this happen, but we all still have a sense of comfort when we’re heard from again.”
The data so far indicates that the helicopters are in good condition. If other health checks return normal, Ingenuity will be prepared for its next journey, west toward a rocky outcrop that the Perseverance team is interested in exploring.
This is not the first time that creativity has suffered communications failure. The helicopters had been cruising around an ancient river delta when they went missing for about six days in April, “an excruciatingly long time,” Travis Browne, chief engineer, wrote in a blog post.
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