NASA engineers announced that there was a communication problem between the mini UAV in the form of a helicopter and its rover partner Perseverance. While investigating the source of the problem, it was decided to stop the ongoing missions, vehicle and planned activities for safety reasons.
Engineers said they hope the problem will be resolved in a few days. But if there is a hardware problem, it can put the future of the mission in great danger. In the best-case scenario, missions involving only the Mars rover can be continued. But even this can cause things to be delayed a few times beyond the planned time.
NASA has no alternative!
According to the information announced, after Ingenuity’s 17th flight on Sunday, December 5, there was an interruption in the radio connection between the helicopter and the rover. The problem occurred during Ingenuity’s landing phase, meaning the crew didn’t know if the helicopter had landed safely and were unable to take pictures from the flight.
But NASA received confirmation that the rover helicopter was healthy about fifteen minutes after the problem occurred. Engineers analyzed existing telemetry data. They confirmed that the problem was in the radio link between the two due to problems in line of sight between the devices.
The flight was planned with the assumption that Perseverance would be in a specific location and orientation. However, within the pre-planned program, the plans for the rover have changed. So it was found elsewhere. It was this difference in distance between the two that caused the interruption in radio communications.
In an interview, a member of NASA’s Ingenuity team confirmed that something was wrong with the device. But he said he didn’t believe it was an insurmountable obstacle. Ingenuity program leader Teddy Tzanetos said in an interview:
Eventually, one way or another, we will achieve much better communication. So the real question is just when are we going to try it again. Basically, we discovered the limits of Ingenuity’s 900 megahertz out-of-the-box radio link.
The limited data received shows that the power in the rotorcraft is excellent. This means it is in a vertical stance, allowing the solar array to efficiently power six lithium-ion batteries.
But the same line-of-sight issues that the team believes hindered communication at the end of flight 17 still prevent most data packets (including images from the flight) from being transmitted to the rover and then back to Earth.
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