NASA has restored communication with its small Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, the US space agency said on Saturday, after an unexpected breakdown led experts to fear the helicopter was permanently out of order, AFP reported.

A helicopter that resembles a larger drone became the first electric device to fly to another planet in 2021.

Ingenuity arrived on Mars on the Perseverance rover, which acts as a data relay between the helicopter and Earth and whose mission is to search for traces of fossil life on the surface of the planet Mars.

Communication between the helicopter and the rover suddenly broke on Thursday during Ingenuity’s 72nd flight.

“Good news today,” tweeted the X platform (formerly Twitter) of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the helicopter’s activities, on Saturday evening.

The agency said contact with the helicopter was eventually restored after Perseverance was ordered to “conduct prolonged listening sessions to pick up Ingenuity’s signal.”

The team operating the helicopter is “examining new data to better understand the sudden loss of communications during Flight 72,” the lab also said.

NASA has re-established contact with the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars

NASA previously said the purpose of Thursday’s flight was to “check the helicopter’s systems after a landing that was earlier than planned during the previous flight.”

Ingenuity reached an altitude of 12 meters, NASA explained in a statement released Friday evening, but “during the descent, communication between the helicopter and the rover was lost earlier, prior to landing.”

JPL announced Friday on Platform X that the Perseverance rover was unable to communicate with Ingenuity, but that experts were “considering getting closer for a visual inspection.”

This is not the first time that NASA has lost contact with a helicopter. Last year, he failed to establish contact for two months.

Ingenuity, which weighs only 1.8 kilograms, was originally planned to take off only cynically, but the mission exceeded all expectations.

In total, the helicopter covered about 17 kilometers and soars to a height of 24 meters.

The durability of this device is impressive, especially considering that it has to survive freezing nights and heat itself thanks to solar panels that charge its batteries during the day.