After a daily life of losing faith in the possibility good software and long lasting consumer products, it’s the Mars Rovers that give me this amazing optimism that humanity is capable of truly awesome feats of engineering. The longevity, durability, and mind-boggling logistics of these rovers is just so fucking cool.

On the other side, recognizing what is ‘good enough’ gave us cheap commodity computing. Not perfect but good enough.

Until proper liability laws come into play, only high integrity systems will have this kind of quality placed into them.

A lot of generic fluff, nothing is specific.. what was the frequency band/s they used? Why line of sight is needed for such comms when it can be done otherwise? Do the chopper needs to be connected all the time for command and control channels, or are there any autopilot? Or is the connection meant is the payload one (camera etc.), I assume there’s or it would’ve crashed in landings if signal was lost and autopilot landed in an unsuitable location? Why move the rover at the same time while the chopper was flying? Shouldn’t be stationary for the best signal? Especially when there’s no gnss system there, why add that complexity of moving two of them (chopper/rover)? And if only one was moving that time, how they missed the fact they are going behind a hill? Was the battery dead when they lost signal? How they charged it after losing it? How they found the chopper in the first place? Did they find it by ground search and then flew the chopper back to the rover? How the battery survived that time?

I don’t know there are a lot of other questions I have in mind, that article barely explains anything..

I think the reason they don't explain much is because a site like space.com would have covered all that many times over by now. Some answers:

1. The copter isn't able to communicate with satellites or earth directly, so it needs to communicate with the rover itself. This is harder without line of site.

2. The copter is all autonomous. Routes are planned and sent for the copter to autonomously fly, because direct control would be infeasible with the latency on Mars.

3. The copter is charged with solar power, and needs time to charge between flights.

4. The main rover has other missions that are independent of the status of the copter. The copter is well well well past the original mission goals, so if it gets left behind that's a shame, but the main rover's missions are way more important.

Thanks for taking the time.

>The copter isn't able to communicate with satellites or earth directly, so it needs to communicate with the rover itself. This is harder without line of site.

Obviously no satcom on there, but even when the chopper communicates with the rover, a LoS isn’t needed, different comms bands can survive that.

>The copter is all autonomous. Routes are planned and sent for the copter to autonomously fly, because direct control would be infeasible with the latency on Mars.

Great, so if it’s planned how they end up with that situation? Was it a calculation errors? Or they suddenly decided to move the rover and lost comms?

>The copter is charged with solar power, and needs time to charge between flights.

Ok now this is interesting, got any more details about it? As the size of the panels would be big and might hinder the chopper movement, unless something innovative was done.

>The main rover has other missions that are independent of the status of the copter. The copter is well well well past the original mission goals, so if it gets left behind that's a shame, but the main rover's missions are way more important.

Ok that’s good to know, still curious about the whole process as I do have a current project with interoperability between UAV/UGV so any previous lessons learned would be great!

Thanks again!

Do/did we know enough about the martian ionosphere to select an appropriate frequency band at the time these craft were launched?

Obviously the solution would be to send two of them next time, and add the ability for both to be used as a relay.

I agree, it's so frustrating that there aren't more technically knowledgeable writers.

> All communications to and from Ingenuity must be routed through Perseverance. That explains the recent silent spell, which the two mission teams had expected: The rover had disappeared behind a hill from the helicopter's perspective, and it didn't come back into view until June 28.

So if they expected this to happen, then why did they send Ingenuity behind a hill?

I'd assume because there's things warranting investigation there?

I'm not sure how the two vehicles interact but would assume it does some reconnaissance and pathfinding for Percy.

> Mars helicopter Ingenuity phones home, breaking 63-day silence

"Mom, could you send me some money ? Books are expensive here on Mars"