The Ingenuity Helicopter On Mars Has Stopped Operating, What's Going On?

The Mars Ingenuity helicopter mission should come to a halt in a few days. (photo: doc. NASA)

JAKARTA - The Mars Ingenuity helicopter mission had to be stopped within a few days, due to problems with the communication system to the rover, Perseverance.

When the helicopter stopped operating, NASA engineers worked out the details of a communication problem between the helicopter and its partner Perseverance.

After Ingenuity's 17th flight on Sunday, December 5, there was a radio link failure between the helicopter and the rover. The problem occurred during the Ingenuity landing phase, unfortunately the team didn't know if the helicopter landed safely, nor were they able to take photos from the flight.

But 15 minutes later, Perseverance received confirmation that the helicopter was healthy. NASA engineers analyzed the available telemetry data and found that the problem was with the radio link between the two because the line of sight between them was quite far.

The flight had been planned assuming Perseverance would be in a certain location and orientation, but the rover's plans changed so it was placed elsewhere. The difference in distance between the two is what causes radio communication to be cut off.

Seeing this, then a member of the Ingenuity team confirmed that there was a problem with the helicopter. “Eventually, one way or another, we'll get much better communication, so it's just a question of when we'll try again,” said Ingenuity program leader Teddy Tzanetos.

"Basically we've found the limits of Ingenuity's 900-megahertz radio link."

Tzanetos said that additional information from Ingenuity had been received by Perseverance, "The limited data received indicates the power aboard the helicopter is excellent, meaning it is in an upright position, allowing its solar array to efficiently power its six lithium-ion batteries," Tzanetos said.

"However, the problem lies in the common line of sight, the team believes that the communication bottleneck at the end of Flight 17 still prevented most of the data packets (including imagery from the flight) from being forwarded back to the rover, and then to Earth," he added.

Now both the helicopter and rover teams are waiting for the opportunity to transfer this data from the previous flight, which is expected to happen in the next few days. This is quoted from Digital Trends, Monday, December 13.