Resurrection of NASA’s Ingenuity Drone on Mars Surprises Engineers

The drone is light as a feather and lands on four slender legs. The fact that it still keeps boiling in the extremely thin atmosphere on Mars surprises the NASA engineers.

After its 49th flight on the Red Planet on April 2 this year, the drone disappeared “from the radar” of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Then had IngenuityIngenuityMeans ingenuity. was a record-high 15.9 meters in the air.

After landing, the NASA team attempted to upload instructions for the next flight, without success.

For almost a week, the team searched for “signs of life” from the drone.

But – after six days, a “simple, lonely” radio signal came, writes Washington Post.

It is NASA engineer Travis Brown who in a blog post at the end of May, gives an insight into Ingenuity’s “resurrection”.

The hope was two days

At the start, the hope was that the extremely advanced drone, with a price tag of 80 million dollars (881 million kroner), would manage in the inhospitable environment of Mars for 30 days.

– None of the mechanisms were designed to survive longer than that, says Teddy Tzanetos, to The Washington Post.

Norwegian behind the levers

Norwegian Håvard Fjær Grip and his team were behind the levers when NASA succeeded in flying the Ingenuity drone on Mars on 19 April 2021.

The short flight of 25 seconds, including stopover and “pirouette” was history’s first controlled and motorized flight on another planet.

Fjær Grip works at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in Los Angeles, and is central to the Ingenuity project, according to NTB.

Under to kilo

The drone weighs around 1.8 kilos, is about half a meter high and filled with avionics. Underneath the body are four slender legs at one end and two rotor blades and a solar panel at the other.

Survived the winter

One of the moves made to get Ingenuity through the unseasonably cold Martian winter was to use data on Martian sunrises to calculate when the helicopter would thaw out each morning and regain enough charge to power on.

Few thought that the solar-charged batteries would survive the winter.

The helicopter entered a low-power state after its 28th flight and the researchers in the Washington Post that they were not sure if the drone would fly again.

The soil samples from Mars are expected in 2033

The Mars project has been so successful that NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (Esa), is planning to send two new drones to Mars.

They will help collect samples from the Martian surface that will later be sent to Earth.

The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars together with Ingenuity in February 2021, is well underway with the collection of such samples.

Each of them is about as thick as a pencil and weighs about 150 grams, and the robotic craft has secured ten of them.

NASA states that eleven more are in the process of being brought in, according to NTB.

If all goes according to plan, they will be sent to Earth in 2033!