By Chris Skeldon 
Creativity is an experimental helicopter sent to Mars as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. With only 49 missions, the equipment stopped communicating. For a while the US space agency thought it had lost it. But it was just intimidating!
NASA open Last week, its Ingenuity rotorcraft, operating in Jezero crater on Mars, lost contact with the mission team for six days in early April.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the helicopter crew was relieved [ao receber um sinal de vida do dispositivo].
Travis Browne, the mission's chief engineer wrote.
According to the team responsible for the creation, this lack of communication wasn't a concern at first. Since January, when Winter has begun in the northern hemisphere of Marsthe solar-powered flying robot showed instability in the night survival mode.
In this battery saving state, the helicopter maintains enough power to prevent accidents during the night.
This map shows the rover and helicopter locations prior to Flight 50. The helicopter icon can be seen in the upper left corner. The rover appears with a red dot in places where contact with the helicopter is not possible. The rover appears with a yellow dot in its location when transferring the Flight 50 setup sequence from the rover to the helicopter. The rover is shown with a green dot at its closest point to the helicopter just before Flight 50 is executed. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
This instability created uncertainty among the mission team as to when creativity would show "signs of life" again. In addition, at this time, a pile of rocks becomes an obstacle between the helicopter and the Perseverance rover - traveling partners who communicate with each other to send commands.
but, Perseverance continued to move across the surface of Mars, and communication between the robots never returned to normal.
[O Ingenuity] It was nowhere to be seen, the situation began to generate some discomfort.
Brown Books.
in More than 700 days of the Mars missionThe team never tested black out total contacts.
The silence that could cost $3 billion
Creation's silence began on April 5 and ended just about 6 days later, when the team detected a signal coming from the helicopter during what would be the activation window—the start of the day's activities.
A second signal the next day confirmed that the helicopter was safe and sound.
Ingenuity made its fiftieth flyby of Mars the next day, April 13th according to the Earth calendar, and reached a height of 18 meters, breaking its own record. The helicopter flew again on April 22, but has remained on the ground since then.
robot I got to the red planet in February 2021, within the Perseverance Organization - who released him after finding a safe place to do so, in April of the same year.
While the rover collects samples of rocks and soil from Mars in order to find evidence of past life, the helicopter takes pictures of the planet and serves as a technical demonstration for future flying vehicles.