[AHOHA]

Thanks for taking the time.

>The copter isn't able to communicate with satellites or earth directly, so it needs to communicate with the rover itself. This is harder without line of site.

Obviously no satcom on there, but even when the chopper communicates with the rover, a LoS isn’t needed, different comms bands can survive that.

>The copter is all autonomous. Routes are planned and sent for the copter to autonomously fly, because direct control would be infeasible with the latency on Mars.

Great, so if it’s planned how they end up with that situation? Was it a calculation errors? Or they suddenly decided to move the rover and lost comms?

>The copter is charged with solar power, and needs time to charge between flights.

Ok now this is interesting, got any more details about it? As the size of the panels would be big and might hinder the chopper movement, unless something innovative was done.

>The main rover has other missions that are independent of the status of the copter. The copter is well well well past the original mission goals, so if it gets left behind that's a shame, but the main rover's missions are way more important.

Ok that’s good to know, still curious about the whole process as I do have a current project with interoperability between UAV/UGV so any previous lessons learned would be great!

Thanks again!

[cwillu]

Do/did we know enough about the martian ionosphere to select an appropriate frequency band at the time these craft were launched?