The Ingenuity team has been playing a 'high-stakes game of hide and seek' with the Martian helicopter for some time now.
After the downlink of data from the 49th flight, the Ingenuity team was unable to uplink instructions to the rotorcraft for its 50th flight. "That downlink was the last time the team would hear from the helicopter for an agonizingly long time," Brown explained in the update.
The problem actually began earlier, though, after flight 40 in January 2023 when the Ingenuity team started experiencing "brownouts" — meaning parts of the helicopter were receiving less power than required and it would go into low-power mode. On Sol 755 , the team completely lost contact with Ingenuity. "In more than 700 sols operating the helicopter on Mars, not once had we ever experienced a total radio blackout, Brown wrote. "Even in the worst communications environments, we had always seen some indication of activity."
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