What's really exciting about the drive down the slope of the Neretva riverbank is that at some point along the way, maybe within a week or two from now, the rover will be visible by #Ingenuity's RTE camera, at the top right corner of an RTE image, as seen in this graphic by @stim3on where I marked a possible appearance with "future Perseverance".
@65dBnoise@stim3on
Now that Ingenuity cannot fly, a plan was mentioned whereby non-volatile memory areas used by flying algorithms would be made available for image and data storage. And, presumably, the RTE camera would be set to take photos on a regular basis.
Do we know if any action was taken to implement that plan and upload it to the helicopter?
Seems unlikely that the rover crew would allocate the resources needed to command the heli take a photo of Percy and transfer it.
@tom30519
The announcement @compi mentioned above says they did, in the usual almost cryptic way they've been saying things lately. Hm, make that the past two years.
@tom30519
I'm sure Ingenuity's team handed over to them all necessary procedures which they can now blindly follow and get data downloaded from the heli.
Why geologists might dislike flying machines on other planets, I cannot fathom. Especially when the latter are "grounded" 🙃
I've been wondering about this for a while. The team modified the heli's software to gather data, which it could in theory collect for many years... AFAIK We've not received any images from the rover since 1069, is it still trying to contact the rover daily? Or has that function been turned off to preserve power, so it can gather data for more years? I hope you're right as I hoped to see periodic images as the rover traversed towards the crater rim :)
@PaulHammond51 During the Martian winter the heli is expected to experience brown-outs, like it did previously. So, it will not actually be preserving much energy by not transmitting a beacon every once in a while; most of it's energy is spent in keeping the electronics warm at night. How that fares is an important matter for future Mars helicopters, I believe.
Also, it doesn't hurt to be a little optimistic. It gives us reasons to post things :-)
@compi@stim3on
Of course, if Ingenuity is still functioning (which I believe it is, although no current info has been made available by its team, or Perseverance's).
@compi
That was more about Ingenuity's team status than about the heli's operational one, I think. As they've stated, the heli has now been re-purposed as a "stationary testbed", collecting data and images which can be downloaded by Perseverance or a future craft at any time in the future. Perseverance is now within range and will have many opportunities to download some of those RTE images, when it is within RTE's FOV. I believe that they will do it, even it's just to test the functionality.
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