[imagesource: NASA illustration]

For the first time since NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover landed together on Mars in February 2021, a connection between the two was lost.

The little chopper is supposed to send regular data to its buddy Perseverance but missed one of the scheduled communications sessions last week.

The reason: it was cold.

It turns out that not even a battery-operated helicopter can withstand the Red Planet’s gruelling winter season, so I am not sure how Elon Musk plans to put us, humans, up there.

The space agency said that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reestablished contact with the little chopper on May 5 after it missed a scheduled call-in about two days before, per Space:

Engineers suggest that the helicopter may have entered a low power state due to a combination of high levels of dust in the atmosphere and low local temperatures. The situation rendered the solar-powered Ingenuity unable to communicate with its base station, the Perseverance rover, which sends the helicopter’s status to Earth via Martian satellite.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

“The dust diminishes the amount of sunlight hitting the solar array, reducing Ingenuity’s ability to recharge its six lithium-ion batteries,” JPL continued. “When the battery pack’s state of charge dropped below a lower limit, the helicopter’s field-programmable gate array (FPGA) was powered down.”

While Ingenuity was just trying to preserve energy, NASA teammates on the ground were freaking out a little, wondering if the chopper was still alive and well, per Gizmodo:

Although brief, Ingenuity’s call reassured the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the helicopter’s battery was healthy and that the solar array was recharging its batteries.

The chopper, becoming the first powered aircraft to lift off from the surface of another planet, is integral to Perseverance’s work, which is on a mission to find evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.

Ingenuity launched to Mars while tucked inside Perseverance’s belly, and the two have been exploring the terrain for more than a year.

Anyway, NASA is working out ways to preserve the battery life so that Ingenuity can survive the bitterly cold Mars winter.

The dust is another issue altogether…

[sources:gizmodo&space]