NASA restored contact with the Ingenuity small helicopter to Marsas announced on Saturday (in the early hours today, Greek time) by the space agency, after an unexpected failure that caused fears of its end.

The helicopter, which looks like a large unmanned aircraft (drone), became in 2021 the first powered flying device to make a flight to another planet.

He had arrived on the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which acts as a “go-between” collecting Ingenuity’s data and relaying it back to Earth and whose mission is to search for traces of ancient life on Mars.

Communications between the helicopter and the rover were suddenly cut off on Thursday during Ingenuity’s 72nd flight.

“Good news today,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which built the helicopter, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Saturday night.

The agency said contact with the helicopter was eventually reestablished, having instructed Perseverance to “conduct long-duration listening sessions in order to receive Ingenuity’s signal.”

The teams responsible for the helicopter are “analyzing the new data to better understand the unexpected loss of communications during Flight 72,” he added.

NASA had previously explained that Thursday’s flight was intended to “verify the helicopter’s systems following an earlier-than-expected landing during the previous flight.”

Ingenuity had reached a height of 12 meters, NASA explained in a message released Friday night, but “during the descent process, communication between the helicopter and the rover was lost prematurely, prior to landing.”

At X, JPL said Friday that the Perseverance rover could not “see” Ingenuity, but its teams “could consider approaching the area for a visual inspection.”

NASA has briefly lost contact with the helicopter before, most notably for a period of about two months last year.

Ingenuity, which weighs just 1.8 kilograms, was originally intended to make just five flights, but the mission exceeded all expectations.

In total, the helicopter covered 17 kilometers and reached a height of 24 meters.

Its longevity is remarkable, given that it has to “survive” the cold of the Martian night and is only heated by its solar panels that charge its batteries during the day.

In collaboration with Perseverance he played a pioneering role in helping his “partner” search for possible evidence of ancient microbial life.