Into the Wild Red Yonder

Being aware of taking note of successful probe landings on Mars but taking their extended missions for granted, I resolved to try and see what happened with the tiny helicopter carried along with the Perseverance rover. As Ingenuity began being swung out from underneath the bigger vehicle, I noticed comments the copter’s batteries were being charged from the rover’s radioisotope thermal generator before being reduced to whatever the little rectangular solar panel above the twin rotors can provide. That gave me a definite sense of a time-limited mission, and when I heard there’d been a pause in operations due to a software glitch that did raise an uncertain feeling or two. So far as the Martian landing site relates to my own perch on the Earth, the test flights were supposed to happen in the small hours of my night.

As it turned out, though, I was headed to Wikipedia to look up a merely science fiction-related topic when I saw a link reporting success in the first flight, which was good to see all the same. I’ll admit to a thought or two of the four-bladed drone copter I was given as a Christmas present a few years ago, and how my test flights with it were never very well-controlled. I have, however, seen a more expensive drone or two able to hold its position in the air and take better pictures. The thought of keeping an eye far enough open to check for aerial pictures from Mars being uplinked back here is in my mind.