Has NASA lost its Ingenuity Mars helicopter?
On Thursday, January 18 NASA lost contact with their 4-pound helicopter named Ingenuity that they’ve been flying around on Mars for the last year.
The Ingenuity Mars helicopter was only built and expected to last on the Marian planet for up to 31 days, but here we are having just completed its 72nd flight over the last 2 years, 11 months and 4 days (as of the writing of this article).
According to an article on Space.com in an update on Sunday, January 21 “NASA announced on Saturday evening (Jan. 20) that it has reestablished contact with Ingenuity after instructing the Perseverance rover “to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal.” The mission team is working to determine what caused the communications dropout during Flight 72.”
I fell in love with NASA and space at an early age, and my interest in space has only grown with the recent Mars missions such as the Perseverance rover and its tiny payload the Ingenuity helicopter. I hope you share in my excitement about these sort of space-related news bits, and I’ll continue to bring you new updates on not only NASA related news but private space companies like SpaceX, RocketLab, and Blue Origin.