Ingenuity

  On February 18, 2021, the Perseverance rover landed on Mars with the Ingenuity Helicopter strapped to its underside. This pair separated soon after their landing and since then, they have been operating independently to carry out their assigned missions. However, in the last couple of weeks, ingenuity has been having troubles.

The original plan was for the helicopter to test its ability to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere which is approximately 1% of that on earth. It was originally intended that the helicopter would make five flights to survey the ground and prove its flight worthiness, however, it has already performed 13 separate flights at this point.

The last flight was on September 5 because as of late with the changing seasons on Mars, the air pressure on Mars is lower than the engineers expected the helicopter to have to fly in. The problem with this is that because of the lower air pressure, the helicopter can’t produce enough lift to take off anymore. In mid-September, they attempted to fly the helicopter by spinning the blades at a higher speed, however, the flight servos were found to be slightly off-angle, and as such, the flight was canceled.

Currently, from our perspective on Earth, Mars is just coming out from around the far side of the sun so we can finally start to get a better idea of what is going on. If they are able to get everything working again, we may see Ingenuity fly again, hopefully within the next month. If the people working on the project are not able to get the helicopter flying with the higher rotation speed, the program will probably be simply canceled as it would take about a year for the pressure to rise again.