NASA lost contact with its Mars helicopter
NASA lost contact with its Mars helicopter
The Ingenuity helicopter, which has been fluttering around the red planet for almost three years now, fell out of contact with Perseverance, the rover that brought it to the planet (and that it communicates with using Zigbee!). NASA wrote yesterday that the flight, its 72nd, was a test of its system...
Considering it was just meant to be a proof of concept and only fly once or twice I would say that 71 flights, a max altitude of 78 ft(24 m), and 10.6 miles or 17 kilometers of travel, not to mention all of the footage from its on board cameras, makes Ingenuity an astounding success.
Especially considering the use of off-the-shelf Snapdragon 801.
There's some nice discussion about Ingenuity here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26177619
...This processor will have not flips on Mars, possibly up to every few minutes. Their solution is to hold two copies of memory and double check operations as much as possible, and if any difference is detected they simply reboot. Ingenuity will start to fall out of the sky, but it can go through a full reboot and come back online in a few hundred milliseconds to continue flying.
-jhurlimanNASA's rovers have been kicking ass for the last few decades. Truly a testament to how great their engineering teams are
I never had contact with it so they are still one up on me.
You've got to point your dish at Mars first, otherwise you can't hear it.
This isn’t the first time they lost contact so it may not be a huge issue in the end.
It's almost definitely because it doesn't have Line Of Sight to establish the connection.
Sort of like how cheap fpv drones will lose video when you fly into another room because the thin drywall blocks the signal enough and the signal can't bounce off other objects in the right way.
So I'm going with "once the rover catches up like last time it'll be fine"
Perhaps the brilliant bunch of folks at JPL will sort this out.
Yeah they were out of contact for 63 days when it flew ahead of perseverance last year: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-home.html
The article doesn't seem to suggest that they've given up on it.