Dust storms and the incoming winter season on Mars will limit NASA's Ingenuity helicopter's ability to fly for the next few months, according to a project engineer. This weather may put the aircraft and its companion, the Perseverance Rover, in serious jeopardy.
A full scale model of the experimental Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which will be carried under the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, is displayed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on February 16, 2021 in Pasadena, California.
NASA Ingenuity to Face Winter Season, More Dust Storms on Mars
According to Tzanetos, NASA's Ingenuity Team Lead from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an article for SciTechDaily, the space helicopter under the Perseverance mission is approaching a dangerous period. Mars would endure a harsh winter season and dust storms with no shelters to seek refuge in because it is a desolate continent.
It will get exceedingly cold, and the spaceship will have little option in terms of its heating system, which will also protect it from external sources while charging. Apart from the apparatus it carried with it, there are no structures or facilities on Mars that could care for them.
It's worth noting that Mars' Winter season will have a difficult time gathering sunlight for its solar power initiatives.
"Currently, we're going through the worst of the Martian dust storm season. The skies are full of dust, and our solar array generation is way down," said Jaakko Karras, Ingenuity's principal engineer, Space News reported.
He added that Ingenuity is now entering winter, which means less solar power and lower temperatures.
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"The hope is that, if we can make it through both of those [dust storms and winter] in a handful of months we'll start getting back into Martian spring where we get very energy positive again and back to business," Karras continued.
Ingenuity's capacity to fly will be limited as a result. Karras believes the project may make some adjustments, such as parking the helicopter on an inclination to improve the amount of sunlight hitting the arrays, which has been done before on solar-powered rovers like Spirit and Opportunity. However, he did say that landing the helicopter on the appropriate inclination may be problematic.
NASA's Ingenuity may lose its power soon, and that's because it can't charge appropriately in this weather on Mars, where it doesn't get enough sunshine for everyone to use. The Ingenuity helicopter was once reset due to a shortage of electricity and the weather conditions on Mars.
Previous Issues With Mars Spacecrafts
It was Ingenuity's first missed tag-up on Mars when it failed to check in with Perseverance as anticipated last month. It was a big deal since Perseverance was in charge of all communications between Ingenuity and its Earth controllers. Two days later, mission team members were able to reconnect the two robots, and they think they now know what caused the dropout.
David Agle, a media representative at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), citing the downlinked data, said the anomaly was caused by the solar-powered helicopter going into low-power mode, possibly due to a yearly increase in dust in the Martian atmosphere and lower temperatures as winter approaches.
"The dust diminishes the amount of sunlight hitting the solar array, reducing Ingenuity's ability to recharge its six lithium-ion batteries," Agle said in an update last month.
The Ingenuity and Perseverance teams have devised a plan to get the helicopter back in the air as soon as possible. They've sent signals to reduce the temperature at which Ingenuity's onboard heaters turn on, perhaps allowing the helicopter's batteries to maintain a charge for longer.
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