WASHINGTON – Dust storms and changing seasons will limit the ability of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter to fly over the next few months, a project engineer said on May 27th.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a video on May 27 compiled from images taken by Ingenuity on a record flight on April 8. On this flight, the helicopter traveled 704 meters at a speed of 5.5 meters per second, the longest and fastest flight to date for NASA. small helicopter.
This flight was the 25th in ingenuity, which was initially scheduled to perform no more than five flights in the course of a few weeks in April 2021. The most recent helicopter flight, and the 28th in total, it was April 29th.
The craft, however, lost communications with the Perseverance rover, which serves as a relief between the helicopter and the controllers returning to Earth on May 3. Contact was restored two days later, and engineers concluded that the rover had entered “low power.” state “when battery levels dropped below a lower limit.
In a May 6 statement, JPL said the increase in dust in the atmosphere was blocking sunlight, reducing the energy that Ingenious solar panels could generate. The lab said it was taking steps to reduce the use of the helicopter’s battery, such as lowering the temperature at which the helicopter turns on the heaters.
“We hope to be able to accumulate battery charge to return to nominal operations and continue our mission in the coming weeks,” Teddy Tzanetos, head of the Ingenuity team at JPL, said in a statement May. In the May 27 flight video release, JPL only said that “the team is waiting for its next flight to Mars.”
“We are currently going through the worst of the Martian dust storm season. The skies are full of dust and our generation of solar arrays is very low,” said Jaakko Karras, chief engineer of Ingenuity, after a presentation on May 27 at the International Space Society’s International Space Development Conference. However, he said Ingenuity is now heading into winter, with less solar power and colder temperatures.
“The hope is that if we can overcome both,” he said, referring to dust storms and winter, “in a few months we will begin to return to the Martian spring where we will have again. a very positive energy again. and go back to business “.
This will limit Ingenuity’s ability to keep flying. Karras said there may be adjustments the mission can make, such as parking the helicopter on a slope to increase the amount of sunlight reaching the arrays, an approach previously used for power rovers. solar like Spirit and Opportunity. However, he noted that it can be difficult to land the helicopter at the correct incline. At the moment, the helicopter is “mostly crouched,” he said.
He didn’t see how long it would take before Ingenuity flew again and how often. “It will certainly take at least a couple of months before we get back to the more luxurious energy levels we are used to,” he said.