![]() What that portends is unclear, but no matter how amazing the engineering is, there’s only so much that can be asked on Ingenuity before something finally gives.Īlso in Mars news this week, our own Al Williams covered an interesting project that really seems to have captured the attention of space geeks, math geeks, and crypto geeks - the signals kind, not the money kind - alike. So that’s good, but the worrying news is that since Sol 685, the helicopter has been switching in and out of nighttime survival mode. Several attempts to upload a flight plan failed with nothing but an acknowledgment signal from the helicopter, but a final attempt got the program uploaded and flight 50 was a complete if belated success. Since the helicopter has now graduated from “technology demonstration” to a full-fledged member of the team tasked with scouting locations for the rover while respecting the no-fly zone around it, it was essential to get it flying again. At first attributed to a “communications shadow” caused by the helicopter’s robotic buddy, Perseverance, moving behind a rocky outcrop and denying line of sight, things got a little dicey once the rover repositioned and there was still no joy. ![]() The report details a protracted communications outage Ingenuity’s flight controllers struggled with for six sols after flight 49 back in April. ![]() A report released this week suggests that 50 flights into its five-flight schedule, the Mars helicopter might be starting to show its age.
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