The Mars helicopter Ingenuity faced a challenge this week when it lost contact with its roving partner Perseverance, the first time in more than a year of operations it had missed a communications check-in.
Fortunately for the brave little helicopter, communications have now been re-established, yet it faces an uphill battle as the Martian dust creeps in.
The drop in communications, which occurred last week due to annoying dust in the Martian atmosphere, according to an update shared by NASA, as the seasons change on Mars, the amount of dust in the atmosphere is increasing and this dust can cover solar panels, such as those on Ingenuity, making it less effective.
Because of the dusty solar panels, Ingenuity is making it difficult for Ingenuity to charge its batteries – a problem the helicopter has faced before when a dust storm passed over Jezero Crater where it is exploring, and it had to clear the dust before it might continue with any operations.
Dust prevented the batteries from charging so much that part of the helicopter’s control system, the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), was turned off.
NASA’s David Agle explained in the update: “When the battery pack’s charge status drops below the minimum, the Helicopter Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is turned off, and the FPGA manages the operational state of Ingenuity, turning on and off other avionics elements as needed to achieve Maximum energy conservation.
It also operates heaters that enable the helicopter to survive the cold Martian nights, maintains the spacecraft’s accurate time, and controls when the helicopter wakes up for persistence communication sessions.
The helicopter is designed to turn components on and off during the day and night as needed, but when the FPGA is unexpectedly turned off, it resets the onboard Ingenuity clock.
Then, when the sun came up and sunlight started recharging its batteries once more, the helicopter’s time was out of sync with the rover, which meant that Ingenuity’s attempts to contact Perseverance were at the wrong time, which is why it missed the check-in process.
Perseverance kept listening for Ingenuity’s check-in signal, arriving on May 5 MST and Ingenuity was able to establish a wireless link and report that it was stable at the right temperature, and that its battery was recharging and was up to 41% of its capacity.
This is all good news, but there is an ongoing problem of dust, and it will still be difficult for the helicopter to charge its batteries enough to survive the cold Martian nights.
This problem comes as no surprise, as Ingenuity was originally designed for only five flights but has made an astounding 24 flights so far, and as the length of this mission increased, the team realized that seasonal changes in weather would create even greater challenges.
“We have always known that winters and dust storms on Mars will present new challenges for creativity, specifically cold, cold weather, increased atmospheric dust, more frequent dust storms, every flight and every mile of The distance traveled outside of our original 30 Mart mission has pushed the spacecraft to its limits on every Martian day.”
To try to keep the creativity going as long as possible, the team sent new commands to the helicopter to lower the temperature at which its heaters run. This saves battery usage because heaters use a lot of energy, but leaves the helicopters exposed to cold temperatures, which is risky.
However, if the devices can survive several nights like these, the battery may be recharged enough that the helicopter can fly once more.
“Our top priority is to maintain communication with Ingenuity for the next few days, but until then, we know there will be significant challenges ahead,” Tzanitos said.
I mightn’t be more proud of our team’s performance over the past year, not to mention the incredible accomplishments of our plane on Mars. We hope to be able to assemble the battery charge in order to return to nominal operations and continue our mission in the coming weeks.”