Considering it was just meant to be a proof of concept and only fly once or twice I would say that 71 flights, a max altitude of 78 ft(24 m), and 10.6 miles or 17 kilometers of travel, not to mention all of the footage from its on board cameras, makes Ingenuity an astounding success.
Especially considering the use of off-the-shelf Snapdragon 801.
There’s some nice discussion about Ingenuity here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26177619
…This processor will have not flips on Mars, possibly up to every few minutes. Their solution is to hold two copies of memory and double check operations as much as possible, and if any difference is detected they simply reboot. Ingenuity will start to fall out of the sky, but it can go through a full reboot and come back online in a few hundred milliseconds to continue flying.
-jhurliman
Imagine telling an airline pilot to just reboot the whole plane if something goes wrong.
I think it exceeded everyone’s expectations. I know I’m pretty astounded. I didn’t realize it had been three years!
This isn’t the first time they lost contact so it may not be a huge issue in the end.
It’s almost definitely because it doesn’t have Line Of Sight to establish the connection.
Sort of like how cheap fpv drones will lose video when you fly into another room because the thin drywall blocks the signal enough and the signal can’t bounce off other objects in the right way.
So I’m going with “once the rover catches up like last time it’ll be fine”
I never had contact with it so they are still one up on me.
Perhaps the brilliant bunch of folks at JPL will sort this out.
Yeah they were out of contact for 63 days when it flew ahead of perseverance last year: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-home.html
The article doesn’t seem to suggest that they’ve given up on it.
