Tag Archives: Mars rovers

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China’s First Mission to Mars Seems to Be Struggling

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The Chinese rover snapped this selfie of itself on Mars shortly after landing on the Red Planet.
Image: China News Service

China’s Zhurong rover went into hibernation mode in May 2022 to avoid the harsh winter season on Mars, but communication issues, both with the rover and orbiter, suggest something’s now very wrong with the mission.

The six-wheeled Martian rover was scheduled to wake up in late December, but it hasn’t been heard from since entering into its scheduled hibernation mode, unnamed sources told the South China Morning Post, as first reported by SpaceNews.

Zhurong landed on Mars on May 14, 2021 as China’s first Martian mission. The rover was sent to Mars with the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which relays data between the rover and ground controllers on Earth. About a year after roaming and investigating the Red Planet, the rover entered hibernation—a kind of low power safe mode—in anticipation of the Martian winter, when temperatures reach around -4 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 degrees Celsius) during the day and -148 F (-100 C) at night. The winter season on Mars also includes sand and dust storms, which block the rover’s solar panels and prevent it from collecting sunlight to generate power. For its own protection, Zhurong hunkered down in a dormant state for those chilly, dusty months on Mars.

By late December, which marks the beginning of Martian spring, the rover was supposed to autonomously resume its activities. However, the China National Space Administration has yet to send out any updates regarding the rover, in what is an ominous sign. The rover’s solar panels could be covered by dust, reducing its ability to generate power and preventing it from turning back on, according to the SCMP’s sources. It’s worth noting that NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are able to power through Mars’s winter season using a radioisotope power system.

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And it may not just be the rover that’s in trouble. The mission’s Tianwen-1 orbiter has also reportedly gone silent. Scott Tilley, professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, noted on Twitter that the radio signals between the ground station and Tianwen-1 indicate that mission controllers may have stopped trying to communicate with the orbiter after failing to achieve contact. This is unfortunate, as China planned to perform aerobraking tests in 2023 with Tianwen-1 in anticipation of a future Mars sample return mission.

It’s possible that the problem with the orbiter is related to the problem with Zhurong, but we’ll have to wait for China to finally say something official on the matter. In the event we don’t hear back from the rover and its orbital companion, China’s mission to Mars will still be deemed a success, as it was initially designed to last for three months on the Red Planet but managed to live on for over a year.

More: China’s Zhurong Rover Captures Remarkable Sights and Sounds on Mars



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Mars Express Sets New Relay Record for Martian Ground Missions

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An artist’s impression of the Mars Express spacecraft.
Illustration: ESA

For 19 years, the Mars Express spacecraft has orbited the Red Planet, providing breathtaking views and valuable insights of Mars. The hard-working orbiter has not only relayed its own data back to Earth, but also provided a communication line between other Martian missions and ground control.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express recently set a new record by relaying data for a total of seven different Mars surface missions, an important feat in helping scientists paint a complete picture of the planet’s history, the space agency announced on Friday. Its latest long-distance call was made on behalf of NASA’s Perseverance rover, the Martian robot that has been roaming the Red Planet since February 2021.

This isn’t the first time a Martian rover borrowed a line to Earth from the Mars Express spacecraft. In 2004, the orbiter flew over NASA’s Spirit rover and beamed a series of commands down to the robot, while Spirit sent up its data for Mars Express to relay it back to Earth. This marked the first time two space agencies created a communications network around another planet.

After its three-way-call with Spirit and ground control, ESA’s Mars Express conducted seven communication tests with Spirit’s twin rover, Opportunity, in 2008. Later on in 2012, Mars Express transferred precious data from NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been roaming Mars for 10 years, to mission control. The spacecraft did so by pointing its lander communication antenna towards Curiosity for 15 minutes while the rover relayed its data to it, and then pointing its more powerful high-gain antenna towards Earth to downlink the information. The data in question was a photo of a rock on Mars, and it marked the first time Mars Express was used to transfer scientific data.

Aside from the four NASA robots, Mars Express also relayed data from NASA’s InSight Lander and China’s Zhurong rover. The orbiter also helped track the landing of the NASA Phoenix Lander in May 2008.

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The Mars Express spacecraft left Earth for Mars in June 2003 and entered Martian orbit following a six-month journey through space. The aging orbiter is still going strong and recently had a much-needed software upgrade to improve its ability to send and receive signals. Although Mars Express is ESA’s lowest-cost mission to date, it has been delivering valuable data on Mars, as well as its moon Phobos. After 19 years in service, the orbiter may end its mission by December of this year, and finally hang up its line to Earth.

More: A Mars Spacecraft Has Been Running on Windows 98 Era Software for 19 Years, But No More

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Abandoned Mars Rover Could Get a Second Chance on the Moon

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An illustration of the Mars Sample Fetch Rover on the surface of the Red Planet.
Illustration: Airbus

The Anon rover was built for Mars, but its interplanetary mission got derailed. The car-sized robot is now undergoing tests at a quarry near London in hopes that it could one day go to the Moon instead.

Over the past two weeks, Airbus has been testing its sample fetch rover in a quarry near Milton Keynes in the U.K., which nicely simulates alien environments. The developing team is hoping that the rover might eventually explore and work on the Moon, The Guardian reported.

The Mars Sample Fetch Rover, also known as Anon, was built by European aerospace company Airbus, and it’s designed to collect sample tubes left behind by NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been roaming the Red Planet since February 2021. Earlier this year, however, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) announced a change of plans for its Mars Sample Return mission, which seeks to return samples to Earth next decade. Instead of using the sample fetch rover, NASA wants Perseverance to transfer the sample tubes to a lander that will be waiting nearby. The space agency also wants to send two Ingenuity-class helicopters to Jezero Crater to scoop up the sample tubes and deliver them to the vicinity of the lander.

The abrupt change in plans meant that Europe’s rover lost its ticket to Mars. That said, Anon’s developers, which have been working on the rover for the past four years, aren’t giving up on this little guy just yet and continue to run tests of the rover’s systems. “Even though the mission may have faded away, the core technology is still ready and able to go and this is the kind of the final step in proving that it works,” Ben Dobke, a project manager at Airbus, told The Guardian.

Instead of Mars, Anon could be headed to the Moon’s surface as part of NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks a sustained and sustainable presence in the lunar environment. The rover won’t collect sample tubes on the Moon, but it could be used for other purposes, such as helping to build lunar habitats.

The rover will need some tweaking for a Moon mission, otherwise it won’t survive the colder temperatures and the total lack of atmosphere. Anon will also have to be adjusted such that it can recover from the long nights on the Moon, which last for 14 days, thereby placing it in total darkness for extended periods, according to The Guardian. Anon does not yet have a ticket to the Moon, but its developers want to be ready should the opportunity emerge.

Anon is the second European-built Martian rover to miss out on its chance to visit the Red Planet. ESA’s ExoMars rover was supposed to launch this year, but the space agency suspended the joint mission with Russian space agency Roscosmos following the invasion of Ukraine. The two rovers are currently awaiting their new fate, but both seem ready for some celestial exploring.

More: The Perseverance Rover Finally Got Its First Martian Rock Sample, For Real This Time

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Rover Gathers Rocks on Active Volcano to Simulate Moon Mission

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The four-wheeled, two-armed Interact rover spent four days collecting rocks on Mount Etna.
Photo: ESA

While working out of a hotel room in Italy, astronaut Thomas Reiter commanded a four-wheeled robot to pick up rocks from the surface of an active volcano on the Sicilian east coast, and he did so while role-playing as though he were in orbit around the Moon.

The four-day simulation is part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) preparation for a future mission to the Moon, where it plans to land a rover on the lunar surface to collect rock samples. The rover, as part of the upcoming Artemis missions, will be guided by a team on Earth, as well as an astronaut aboard Lunar Gateway, a planned space station that will orbit the Moon.

The Scout crawler makings its way around Mount Etna.
Gif: ESA

Although it’s not quite the Moon, the volcanic surface of Mount Etna served as an analog for the lunar surface. The four-wheeled, two-armed Interact rover was modified for the rugged slopes of the volcano, and it explored the rough terrain alongside two other rovers, Lightweight Rover Units 1 and 2, belonging to the German Aerospace Center. In addition, a stationary lunar lander provided the rover with wifi and power, an overhead drone performed surface mapping, and a centipede-like crawler called Scout served as a relay between the Interact rover and the lander. Scout was provided by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

During the four days, ESA astronaut Reiter commanded the rover to pick up rocks using controls that were set up at a hotel room in Sicily. Interact rover was also guided by controllers in a rover control room, which was set up in a different hotel room since the controllers and the astronaut will be physically separated during an actual mission.

The rover itself was about 14 miles (23 kilometers) away from the hotel and at an altitude of about 8,500 feet (2,600 meters) on Mount Etna. To make the exercise more realistic, the team added one second of signal delay to the control system to simulate the time it would take for commands to reach the Moon’s surface from Lunar Gateway. As the rover picked up the rocks from the volcano, Reiter could feel what the rover’s gripper felt from the remote control—an added dimension to the ESA sample collection exercise.

Astronaut Reiter commanded the rover to pick up rocks from this hotel room nearby.
Photo: ESA

“We’ve learned a lot about collaboration between ground control on Earth and the crew aboard a space station orbiting the Moon, both operating a rover on the surface—this ‘shared’ operation can be extremely efficient—much more efficient than if either side does it alone,” Reiter said in a statement.

The Interact rover wrapped up its mission by bringing the rock samples to the lunar lander.
Gif: ESA

The system has been in development for more than a decade, beginning as a joystick that could be controlled by an astronaut while in orbit, according to ESA. The four-day simulation marks the first time that the Interact rover was put to the test during a mock outdoor setup. By the end of the four days, the rover successfully returned the rock samples to the lunar lander. The three rovers also worked together to set up an array of antennas across the simulated lunar surface to emulate a radio astronomy station on the Moon. Interestingly, these antennas actually managed to pick up a radio burst from Jupiter—the result of its volcanic moon Io passing through the planet’s magnetic field.

By the end of the simulation, ESA found that the controls for the rover were likely going to be too onerous for astronauts on board the future Lunar Gateway.

“What we soon found was that continuous remote oversight was very demanding on the astronaut operator, so we added in features to take some of the pressure off—equivalent to the assisted driving offered by modern cars,” Thomas Krueger, the head of ESA’s Human Robot Interaction Lab, said in a statement. “So for example the operator can point to a location and let the rover decide for itself how to get there safely. And its neural net has been programmed to recognize scientifically valuable rocks for itself.”

That definitely sounds much easier and certainly more fitting for the futuristic Artemis era. ESA hopes to launch the rover and put the control system into real action by the end of this decade.

More: Microbes May Hold the Secret to Creating More Powerful Rocket Fuel.

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover Rolls Past Evidence of Ancient Water

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For the past 10 years, the Curiosity rover has traveled across the Martian terrain, looking for clues to the planet’s potentially habitable past. Recently, the car-sized robot drove through a transition zone, going from an area that may have once hosted lakes on the surface to one that signifies drier conditions for the Red Planet.

NASA’s Curiosity rover took note of the change in scenery higher up on a Martian mountaintop, which the robot has been climbing since 2014. The 3.4-mile-tall (5-kilometer) Mount Sharp is the central peak in Mars’ Gale Crater, which the rover is exploring for signs of ancient water. At the base of Mount Sharp, Curiosity collected evidence for clay minerals that formed from lakes and streams that once ran through Gale Crater. But higher up on the mountain, those streams had seemingly dried up into trickles and sand dunes, which had formed above the lake sediments.

This so-called transition zone is marked by a shift from a clay-rich region to one filled with the salty mineral sulfate, and could potentially signify a major shift in Mars’ climate that took place billions of years ago. The higher up Curiosity goes on Mount Sharp, it detects less clay, and more sulfate. Curiosity will soon start drilling the last rock sample collected in the transition zone in hopes of learning more about the change in the mineral composition of the rocks in that area.

“We no longer see the lake deposits that we saw for years lower on Mount Sharp,” Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA news release. “Instead, we see lots of evidence of drier climates, like dry dunes that occasionally had streams running around them. That’s a big change from the lakes that persisted for perhaps millions of years before.”

The Curiosity rover captured this panorama of a sulfate-bearing region on Mars.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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The area that Curiosity is currently exploring also boasts hills that may have formed in dry conditions, and those hills are marked by large, wind-swept sand dunes that likely hardened into rock over time, according to NASA. Meanwhile, the rover also found evidence of sediments that were carried over by streams of water through the sand dunes. Those sediments now appear as stacked layers of flaky-looking rocks.

Although Mars is a desolate, dry planet today, scientists believe that it may have once been habitable, hosting lakes and other bodies of water on its surface. Early on in its history, Mars somehow lost some of its atmosphere, and its water dried up. Various robotic missions, from NASA and other space agencies, have worked to piece together this ancient history. A newer Mars rover, Perseverance, landed on the planet in February 2021 and has been searching for microfossils—preserved evidence of ancient microbial life.

As it inches closer to its 10-year anniversary on Mars, Curiosity has started to show some signs of aging. On June 7, Curiosity went into the dreaded safe mode when a temperature reading showed warmer temperatures than usual, according to NASA. The rover was back in action two days later, but NASA engineers are still looking into the cause of the issue, hoping that it won’t affect the rover’s operations as it climbs to the top of a new era of Martian history.

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NASA Scientists Made a Martian ‘Soundscape’ Using Audio Recorded by Perseverance Rover

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NASA scientists have cut down a year of Perseverance’s audio recordings on the Martian surface to a five-hour playlist of the Red Planet’s best hits (you can listen to some here). The sounds are eerily quiet and offer a new way of exploring the Martian environment. They’ve already helped confirm some theories about the way sounds travels on the planet.

Audio from the rover was first published last year—none of the sounds were very pleasing to the ear, possibly due to electromagnetic interference. The latest sounds are softer than those screeches; an analysis of the sounds and what they can tell us about how sound travels on Mars was published last month in Nature.

Baptiste Chide, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told Gizmodo in a video call last year that audio heard on Mars would sound like it was coming through a wall, due to the Martian atmosphere being 1% as dense as Earth’s. But Chide was still taken aback at just how quiet Mars turned out to be. “It is so quiet that, at some point, we thought the microphone was broken,” Chide said in an Acoustical Society of America release.

The Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021 with a suite of technologies designed to find out whether Mars ever hosted microbial life in its ancient past. But besides those science instruments, the rover also came packed with two microphones, made from off-the-shelf components, to record the very first audio data on Mars.

One of the microphones on Perseverance is attached to the rover’s frame and sits just above one of its wheels. That microphone is encased in mesh to protect it from Martian dust, which is kicked up by the planet’s winds and can be fatal to spacecraft, as the Opportunity rover so inopportunely learned. The other microphone is fastened to the rover’s SuperCam, one of the machine’s main cameras that sits on an arm above the rover’s frame.

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As a result, the researchers found that the latter microphone picked up sounds of the wind blowing around the rover, while the former microphone picked up more sounds from the rover’s activities. The microphones successfully picked up the whine of the Ingenuity helicopter in flight, even when the rotorcraft was over 300 feet away.

In March, Chide’s team used the SuperCam microphone to measure the speed of sound on Mars. The more recent research leveraged both microphones to characterize the acoustic environment of Mars, and used near and distant sound sources to show how the carbon dioxide-heavy atmosphere affected sound’s ability to travel.

Mars is much colder than Earth, with a thinner atmosphere. NASA scientists expected sound to travel slower on Mars as a result, and it did. The researchers found that higher-frequency sounds traveled faster than lower-frequency noise, as well.

Sound on Mars will change throughout the planet’s 687-day year. During the Martian winter, carbon dioxide in the planet’s polar regions freezes, which will cause the loudness of sounds to fluctuate, according to the release. So stay tuned. As long as Perseverance performs as its name suggests, we ought to be getting a more diverse portfolio of Martian mixes soon.

More: Here’s 16 Minutes of Perseverance Rover Going Kssst, Tiktik, and Pffft

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Dust Storm Sends China’s Mars Rover Into Safe Mode

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China’s Zhurong rover is currently in safe mode as it waits out a Martian dust storm, according to Chinese state-run media, and it may remain in safe mode until the end of 2022.

Zhurong landed on Mars a year ago this month; since then, the rover has recorded video and audio from a sweeping lava plain called Utopia Planitia, over 1,000 miles from NASA’s Perseverance rover.

Zhurong’s initial mission was just 90 days, but since then the rover has continued to study the Martian surface and atmosphere. The rover was also forced into a safe mode in September 2021, when a solar conjunction disrupted communications between Earth-based space agencies and all Martian spacecraft. Now, the issue is not with the motion of heavenly bodies but with local extreme weather.

It’s recently become winter in Utopia Planitia, and the conditions are harsh even without the dust storm. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) told state-run media Xinhua that daytime temperatures could go below -4 degrees Fahrenheit, and nighttime temperatures could be a cog-chilling -148 degrees Fahrenheit. The agency stated that Zhurong won’t wake up for a while—probably December, when the Martian spring returns, according to Xinhua.

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Utopia Planitia’s plain, like much of Mars, is dusty, making spacecraft on its surface susceptible to the massive storms kicked up by Martian winds. Such storms can be deadly to the Martian spacecraft that rely on solar power; the storms can blot out sunlight for months.

A 2018 dust storm led to the end of NASA’s Opportunity rover mission. In January this year, the InSight lander was forced into safe mode by a similar storm; though it survived, dust coating the lander’s solar panels means the spacecraft is operating on borrowed time and probably will be decommissioned by the end of the year.

Zhurong is expected to handle the ongoing storm with relative ease, though, and its safe mode is more a precaution than a desperate measure. In the meantime, CNSA’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter will continue to monitor the Martian atmosphere for any changes—for better or for worse—in the Red Planet’s weather.

More: Gigantic Dust Towers on Mars Could Explain How the Red Planet Lost its Water

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The InSight Mars Lander Mission Will End This Year, NASA Says

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NASA officials announced in a press conference today that the InSight lander on Mars will likely stop operating at the end of 2022, following three years of scientific work on the surface of the Red Planet.

InSight arrived on Mars in November 2018, and during its time on the Martian surface it has collected remarkable data on the planet’s structure and the seismic events that emanate from its interior. Most recently, the lander detected its largest marsquake yet and the biggest quake ever detected on another world: a magnitude 5 event. (Magnitude 5.0 earthquakes are often felt on Earth, and tend to cause minor damage; the previous largest quake on Mars was nearly 10 times smaller than that.)

But now, the lander is beset with dust that has settled on its solar panels, hindering its ability to take in light and generate power. The InSight team came up with a McGuyver-esque way of shaking some of that dust off: by scooping up Martian soil and dropping it on the dust, they were able to marginally clean up the panels. That maneuver was done successfully six times, according to Kathya Zamora Garcia, the Deputy Project Manager for InSight.

But the reality of InSight’s situation is that it’s in a hostile environment; nothing lasts forever, and the lander seems fated to conclude its scientific operations this summer and terminate all operations by the end of the year, according to the InSight team’s estimates.

“One of InSight’s legacies is that it really proves the technique of seismology for planetary science,” said Bruce Banerdt, the InSight Principal Investigator, during the press conference. “We’ve been able to map out the inside of Mars for the first time in history.”

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In its tenure, the lander has detected 1,313 marsquakes to date. When it began its science, InSight was capable of running for about 5,000 watt-hours per sol (Martian day); now, overwhelmed by the Martian dust, the lander can only manage 500 watt-hours per sol. The reduction is the equivalent of going from running an electric oven for an hour and 40 minutes per day on Earth to only about 10 minutes per day, Zamora Garcia said.

Seismic measurements are crucial for understanding the structure and evolution of rocky worlds like Earth, Mars, and Venus. On Earth, many seismic events are caused by plate tectonics, but others are caused by sources in the crust or convection in the mantle, the molten region below the crust. Mars has no plate tectonics, so the events are strictly the latter, though the seismometers also can pick up movements from impact events.

InSight was charged with (and delivered on) giving humanity the best-yet look at Mars’ geological and seismological systems. InSight revealed the thickness and makeup of the Martian crust, as well as details of the planet’s mantle and core. But the lander also had its struggles. Dust storms previously forced the lander into safe mode, and the InSight ‘Mole’—a heat probe that was supposed to dig into the Martian surface—got stuck in the vexing consistency of the Martian soil. The Mole was abandoned in January 2021.

Scientific operations could end as early as mid-July, Zamora Garcia said, but InSight’s fate ultimately comes down to the favorability (or ire) of the Martian climate. “It’s exceeded our expectations at just about every turn on Mars,” Banerdt said. “It may actually last longer than that.”

An errant dust storm could doom the lander even earlier, or a fortuitous dust devil could whip the accreted dust off the lander’s solar panels, providing a boost in power. “We’re working to get as much as we can, but we’ll just have to see what Mars and InSight gives us,” Banerdt said.

Barring any Martian miracles, the fastidious InSight lander is on its last legs. For every one of its struggles and failures, the lander produced a bevy of data on the buried secrets of rocky worlds beyond our own. So thanks, InSight, for all your unheralded perseverance.

More: NASA’s InSight Caught a Lonely Martian Sunrise

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Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Went Silent, Leaving Anxious NASA Team in the Dark

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Late last week, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter managed to reestablish its connection with the Perseverance rover following a brief communications disruption. The space agency says the looming winter is likely responsible and is making adjustments as a result.

On Thursday, Ingenuity—mercifully—sent a signal to Perseverance after the intrepid helicopter missed a scheduled communications session. It marked the first time since the pair landed together on Mars in February 2021 that Ingenuity has missed an appointment, according to NASA.

The team behind the mission believes that Ingenuity had entered into a low-power state to conserve energy, and it did so in response to the charge of its six lithium-ion batteries dropping below a critical threshold. This was likely due to the approaching winter, when more dust appears in the Martian atmosphere and the temperatures get colder. The dust blocks the amount of sunlight that reaches the helicopter’s solar array, which charges its batteries.

The Perseverance rover is on a mission to find evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars, while the rover’s much smaller companion, Ingenuity, became the first powered aircraft to lift off from the surface of another planet on April 19, 2021. The two robots share a communication line, with Perseverance relaying Ingenuity’s messages to Earth. Ingenuity uses small antennas to communicate with Perseverance, exchanging data that is then routed to the rover’s main computer and transferred to Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network (a global array of radio antennas).

Ingenuity has an alarm that wakes the helicopter for its scheduled communication sessions with Perseverance. But on May 3, Ingenuity was a no-show for the scheduled daily data exchange after its field-programmable gate array lost power overnight, causing a reset of the helicopter’s onboard clock (the gate array manages Ingenuity’s operational state, switching its electronic systems on and off to conserve power). The Sun’s rays recharged Ingenuity’s batteries the following morning, but the helicopter’s clock was now out of sync with Perseverance’s clock. By the time Ingenuity was able to send out a signal, the rover was no longer listening.

Two days later, mission control set out to fix the pair’s communication issue by programming the rover to spend nearly the entirety of its 429th sol (a Martian day, which lasts slightly longer than a day on Earth) listening for the helicopter’s signal. Ingenuity’s call finally came in on May 5 at 11:45 a.m. local Mars time. Although brief, Ingenuity’s call reassured the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the helicopter’s battery was healthy and that the solar array was recharging its batteries.

Ingenuity wasn’t exactly built to withstand the harsh Martian winter nights, as the rotorcraft was designed to last only 30 sols on Mars. But the 19-inch tall (48 cm), 4-pound (1.8 kg) helicopter has gone far beyond its test flights, recently receiving an extension on its mission to assist Perseverance as it explores the Martian terrain. Ingenuity will now fly above the Martian surface, advising Perseverance’s controllers on the most ideal routes.

“We have always known that Martian winter and dust storm season would present new challenges for Ingenuity, specifically colder sols, an increase in atmospheric dust, and more frequent dust storms,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at JPL, said in a statement. “Every flight and every mile of distance flown beyond our original 30-sol mission has pushed the spacecraft to its limits each and every sol on Mars.”

For now, the team has put together a plan to help the tiny helicopter survive the looming winter. The newly issued commands “lower the point at which the helicopter energizes its heaters from when the battery falls below 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 degrees Celsius) to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 40 degrees Celsius),” according to NASA, which added that the “helicopter then shuts down quickly, rather than consuming the battery charge with the heaters.” This should allow Ingenuity to accumulate battery charge during the day, which it can then use to survive the bitterly cold nights.

“Our top priority is to maintain communications with Ingenuity in the next few sols, but even then, we know that there will be significant challenges ahead,” Tzanetos said. “We are hopeful that we can accumulate battery charge in order to return to nominal operations and continue our mission into the weeks ahead.”

Even with the dropped call, Ingenuity still remains the little copter that could, surpassing expectations with a total of 28 flights logged on Mars. Hard to believe now, but the original plan was to have Ingenuity perform just five flights on the Red Planet.

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Mars Rover Being Packed Into Storage After Russian Launch Scrapped

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A prototype of the ExoMars rover in Stevenage, England, in 2019.
Photo: Dan Kitwood (Getty Images)

The European Space Agency is scrambling to figure out the ExoMars rover’s next-possible launch window after the agency suspended cooperation with the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover (named for the famous chemist) was slated to launch for the Red Planet in September. It is one half of the ExoMars program; the other half is a Mars orbiter that launched in 2016. Like the Perseverance rover, Rosalind Franklin will conduct an astrobiological search of Mars. But with the September launch called off, the rover’s components will now be stored in Italy until further notice.

“I hope that our Member States will decide that this is not the end of ExoMars, but rather a rebirth of the mission, perhaps serving as a trigger to develop more European autonomy,” said David Parker, director of Human and Robotic Exploration at the ESA, in an agency release.

The Rosalind Franklin rover was developed by ESA, but Roscosmos was providing the Proton rocket to launch the spacecraft, as well as the mission’s landing platform. The landing platform was to be a home base of sorts for the rover’s science experiments, and it would have taken measurements of Mars’ climate, atmosphere, and radiation levels.

Though the Russian invasion interrupted the rover’s timeline, the Rosalind Franklin rover nonetheless had its systems review this month. The ESA review board confirmed that the spacecraft would have been ready for the September launch.

In a statement released earlier this month, ESA said that several proposals on how to proceed with the ExoMars mission without Russian involvement would be submitted in the weeks ahead. But the damage is effectively done when it comes to the rover’s timeline.

A Roscosmos Proton rocket launches for Mars in 2016.
Photo: Stephane Corvaja/ESA (Getty Images)

The rover’s development was previously delayed due to technical difficulties and the covid-19 pandemic. As the recent review revealed, technical issues had been resolved and, if not for the Ukraine invasion, another rover would soon be on its way to Mars.

Rosalind Franklin can do some things Perseverance cannot. It’s designed to be the first rover to drill over 6.5 feet into the Martian soil, a feat not even NASA’s Mole was capable of. (The InSight lander tried valiantly to dig into the planet, but the Martian soil clumped in a way that made it impossible for the Mole probe to make progress.) So when Rosalind Franklin does get to Mars—fingers crossed—it will be breaking new ground.

A fast-track study to determine ExoMars’ next steps sans Russia is on the way; because launch windows to Mars depend on Earth’s proximity to the Red Planet, it will be at least a couple of years before the mission gets off the ground.

More: NASA and ESA Change Plans for Ambitious Mars Sample Return Mission

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