WASHINGTON (AFP) – National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has re-established contact with its tiny helicopter on Mars, the United States space agency said on Saturday, after an unexpected outage prompted fears that the hard-working craft had finally met its end.
Ingenuity, a drone about 0.5 metres tall, arrived on Mars in 2021 aboard the rover Perseverance and became the first motorised craft to fly autonomously on another planet.
Data from the helicopter are transmitted via Perseverance back to Earth, but communications were suddenly lost during a test flight on Thursday, Ingenuity’s 72nd lift-off on Mars. “Good news today,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) wrote on X, formerly Twitter, late on Saturday.
The agency said that contact had finally been made with the helicopter by commanding Perseverance to “perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal”.
“The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout during Flight 72,” it added.
Its longevity has proved remarkable, particularly considering that it must survive glacially cold Martian nights, kept warm by the solar panels that recharge its batteries during daylight hours.
