You Can Stop Holding Your Breath - Ingenuity Talked Back

NASA lost contact with the Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars on Friday the 19th.  In a Tweet in the evening of the 20th (Saturday), they announced they had made contact with the little helicopter again. It's just that the story didn't show up until today.

As you can see, the JPL said they programmed the Perseverance rover to perform long-duration listening sessions to help pinpoint Ingenuity's signal.  Ingenuity communicates back to Earth by using the rover's radio system, which is picked up by the Deep Space Network, like just about everything beyond Earth's orbit in deep space.  We can be sure that any system that weighs more than a few grams wouldn't have been put on Ingenuity, which was intended as an experiment to determine if it was even possible to fly such a vehicle in the thin Martian atmosphere.

That's actually pretty much all we know. Whatever it was that caused the communications drop wasn't so serious that the little helicopter is disabled.  The glitch is over and I expect more flights to resume.  After they go over the data a few more times to ensure it doesn't look like they damaged Ingenuity, and that the glitch wasn't something they programmed wrong.