The NASA Mars helicopter’s work is not done, it turns out

NASA’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, has been grounded since January 18 after suffering damage to one of its rotors as it came in to land. The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which oversees the Ingenuity mission, celebrated the plucky helicopter for achieving way more flights on the red planet than anyone had expected — 72 in all — and becoming the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity’s success helped engineers to learn more about how to fly aircraft on Mars and in other challenging environments, paving the way for work on more complex rotorcraft for future missions. The Mars helicopter is now in its final resting place on a dune inside Mars’ Jezero Crater. But while most people have been thinking that it’s mission accomplished for the helicopter, it turns out that it’s actually still operating and in touch with its team at JPL. Responding to a question during an ask-me-anything session on Reddit this week, a NASA official revealed that Ingenuity is in fact snapping images and beaming them back to Earth. While the pictures are mostly of martian sand due to the camera’s downward-facing position, the team is using the imagery to learn about geological processes on Mars. As per NASA: “The team continues to run vehicle health checks while snapping images of the martian surface. Though we mostly see the sand below us with the color camera, martian scientists can learn about geological processes by having a series of images taken from one spot to see how dust, sand, and rock particles move in response to martian weather and wind.” Fans of Ingenuity are sure to be delighted to learn that while it’s no longer able to take to the skies, the trusty device is still powered up and working away on the martian surface. It’s not clear how for much longer Ingenuity will be able to operate. Much will depend on the time it takes for martian sand to cover its solar panels. When that happens, as it did it with NASA’s stationary InSight Mars lander in 2022, it will be well and truly game over for the Mars helicopter. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has captured what’s believed to be the first orbital image of the Curiosity rover “on the move.” The remarkable photograph, enhanced to bring out the details, clearly shows the tracks created by Curiosity’s six wheels as it rolls across the red planet’s barren landscape, with a tiny speck denoting the rover itself.  NASA astronaut Don Pettit is just a couple of days away from returning to Earth on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft after a seven-month stay at the International Space Station, making it the perfect time to revisit his astonishing account of his first Soyuz homecoming in 2003. In the article, Pettit describes in vivid detail the extraordinary experience of hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere at five miles a second, and how malfunctions with Soyuz led to the flight home becoming a kind of test landing for a future crewed mission to Mars. Perseverance’s challenging three-and-a-half month climb out of Jezero Crater has definitely been worth it, with NASA reportedly discovering a fascinating array of rocks worthy of detailed examination.  “During previous science campaigns in Jezero, it could take several months to find a rock that was significantly different from the last rock we sampled and scientifically unique enough for sampling,” said Perseverance project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is overseeing the rover mission. “But up here on the crater rim, there are new and intriguing rocks everywhere the rover turns. It’s been all we had hoped for and more.”