For the first time since landing on the red planet last February, there was a communication failure between the Ingenuity helicopter and the Perseverance rover.
The Martian weather, the changing seasons, makes the daily life of the various space structures very difficult, with one of the biggest problems being the Martian dust storms, which are a feature of the autumn and winter seasons. It is thought to be the cause of the recent communication failure between Ingenuity and Perseverance, where dust covered the solar panels and the tiny helicopter was unable to get enough power to switch to low-power mode, thus losing contact with the Perseverance Mars rover, which was acting as a base station.
A JPL from it turns out that the link between the helicopter and Perseverance was finally restored after NASA engineers reprogrammed the rover to listen for the signal from the helicopter all day. The flying machine uses the Mars rover as a base, allowing it to send data to ground control and receive commands from there.
The Ingenuity helicopter, attached to the Perseverance Mars rover, arrived on Mars last February with the aim of finding out whether robots of similar design could carry out their mission on the alien planet. Weighing just 1.8 kilograms, the helicopter has far outperformed its expectations: scientists had previously expected only four or five flights, but in April it completed its 25th flight to the red planet, breaking its own distance and speed records to beat.
