NASA's plan to get Ingenuity through the Martian winter:
Since a Martian year amounts to roughly two years on Earth, and the helicopter is in the northern hemisphere, this is Ingenuity's first winter. As the solstice approaches, days are getting shorter and nights longer, and dust storms could become more frequent. That all means less sunlight for the solar panels mounted above the helicopter's twin 4-foot rotor blades. Dust on solar panels recently spelled the end of operations for NASA's InSight Mars lander, and the effects of cold on electronics is believed to have played a role in the end of the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rover missions.
"We believe it's survivable," Dave Lavery, NASA's program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, told WIRED, but "every extra day is a gift." JPL Ingenuity team lead Teddy Tzanetos recently wrote in a NASA blog post that "each sol (Martian day) could be Ingenuity's last." that "each sol (Martian day) could be Ingenuity's last."
[...] As Ingenuity halts normal flight activity, the team will focus on transferring data like flight performance logs and high-definition images from the last eight flights and making software upgrades. Based on a climate model, NASA expects solar energy levels to rebound to a level that allows the resumption of normal activity this fall. By September or October, if Ingenuity is able to regain the ability to heat its systems at night, it could resume regular flight operations, scouting potential places for the Perseverance rover to stash a collection of rock and soil samples and explore what scientists believe used to be a river delta within the Jezero Crater.
[...] Improvements to these systems could be transferred during the helicopter's winter downtime. "If Ingenuity is able to continue operations later this year, after getting through the Martian winter, the team is currently considering several flight system upgrades that would increase system robustness and/or improve the navigation capabilities of the helicopter," Lavery wrote in an email to WIRED.
[...] NASA's ROAMX project is designing improvements to be incorporated into the next helicopter, like changes to the rotor blades that reduce drag and could enable it to carry a scientific payload that weighs about 2 pounds a distance of about 4 miles. In a presentation about future flights to Mars, last year NASA principal investigator Haley Cummings said rotor blade refinements uncovered by ROAMX will be incorporated into the Mars Science Helicopter, a 66-pound hexacopter with six rotors that could lose a rotor but continue to operate. The conceptual drone was first proposed in a white paper published in early 2021.
[...] Lavery says Ingenuity's first winter will be a challenge the team never expected to encounter—but now that they've shown that it's possible to fly a helicopter on Mars, there's potential to make flying companions a commodity for future missions to explore other celestial objects. "We haven't made a decision yet on exactly what the next one will be," says Lavery. "But the one thing I do feel fairly confident about is there will be a next one."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 14 2022, @12:23AM
While the copter waits for spring. Hope it doesn't go out of communication range
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 14 2022, @10:48AM
insite to preserve itself, so let's hope Ingenuity comes up with some ingenius way of preservation.