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12 JULY-AUGUST 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING ment, and greater considera- tion of surface features af- fecting line-of-sight very likely were part of flight analysis). Flight 28 was, perhaps, the most disconcerting of the se- ries, with days of lost commu- nications to Percy, a dead inclinometer (a sensor com- posed of two accelerometers that determine, simply, which way is down in order to de- termine copter orientation), and Martian northern winter looming. Despite these issues, Flight 29 occurred successfully on June 11 th and we now await word on any additional flights to be taken. Whether it awakens from, or suc- cumbs to, the upcoming Martian winter, Ingenuity has already ex- ceeded expectations and marks the beginning of a great new chapter in planetary exploration. Plans for fu- V ideo from the navigation camera aboard NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter shows its record- breaking 25 th flight on April 8, 2022. Covering 2,310 feet (704 meters) at a maxi- mum speed of 12 mph (5.5 meters per second), it was the rotor- craft’s longest and fastest flight to date. [NASA/JPL- Caltech] future missions the same problems. Ingenuity has had its share of issues throughout the (so far) 425 sol mis- sion, and we are fortunate that NASA is such a transparent organi- zation as to make the public aware of things breaking and being fixed. The first attempts at flights 4 and 7 failed due to reported soft- ware issues, during which the phrase “watchdog timer” (a simple software check of system and condi- tion status) became one all Mars enthusi- asts learned the mean- ing of. The time around September 18, 2021 (between suc- cessful flights 13 and 14) saw a test of in- creased rotor speed to obtain more lift in the colder and thinning atmosphere, but was canceled due to a servo motor issue. Res- olution was delayed due to solar conjunc- tion, when Mars was behind the Sun with F ive spacecraft currently in orbit about the Red Planet make up the Mars Relay Network to transmit commands from Earth to surface missions and receive science data back from them. Clockwise from top left: NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Mars Atmospheric and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN), Mars Odyssey, and the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Mars Ex- press and Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). [NASA/JPL-Caltech, ESA] respect to Earth. Flight 17 included a loss of communication between Percy and Ginny, ascribed to fea- tures on the Martian terrain that blocked signals (for which the limits of the antennas, the value of shorter distances between equip-