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Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
- Shivetya 8y agoSo why not a blimp? I did not see any mention why they did not consider this though they did mention the Soviets using balloons on Venus. Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?
- baybal2 8y ago>Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle? Yes
- dmurray 8y agoIt sounds like it might be feasible: the atmosphere on the surface of Mars is described as the equivalent of Earth at "100,000 feet" (30 km) but the record for a weather balloon is 53km, and balloons carrying people have gone as high as 40km. The helicopter being proposed is "the size of a softball", though, and not the main focus of the mission. The high altitude weather balloons have been much bigger and would probably need a dedicated mission.
- amelius 8y agoWhy don't they test the helicopter at 100k feet then?
- dmurray 8y agoThe article doesn't say whether they will or not.
- MereInterest 8y agoNot having read the article, I am sure that they already did. Nothing gets sent beyond Earth's orbit without having gone through as much testing as is humanly possible on Earth. The cost of failure on Earth is several orders of magnitude less expensive than the cost of failure elsewhere. I would guess that sending a test helicopter along with another rover would be to do a feasibility test for larger flight-based probes in the future. Test it now with a small helicopter, and you use 10-20 pounds of payload in order to do better wind and atmospheric studies. On the other hand, if you send a probe that uses flight as its primary mode of transportation, and some unknown unknown causes it to fail, you've scrapped the entire mission.
- dmurray 8y agoThey might not have, because it might just fall out of the sky. It's built to overcome Mars' gravity, not Earth's. However I agree with you, they will be testing it extensively in as close to Martian conditions as they can achieve.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> They might not have, because it might just fall out of the sky. It's built to overcome Mars' gravity, not Earth's. A video has them flying that thing inside a pressure chamber without payload, so at least in this configuration it has enough power to overcome Earth's gravity. Probably wouldn't lift off on Earth with the payload, though.
- av501 8y agoMy guess is that they test it in chambers with lowered air pressure and composition to match 100k feet?
- toss1 8y agoat about 50sec into the video they appear to be doing exactly such a test in a large vacuum chamber
- phyller 8y agoForgive my ignorance, but I'd think the lower gravity would actually reduce buoyancy, so a lighter than air vehicle would have less upward force, while being at the mercy of high winds. At the same time, less gravity makes it easier for a helicopter because less lift would be required for a heavier than air vehicle.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoOn Mars, gravity + thin air would likely limit the usefulness. But you're spot-on with Venus. Blimps would be great there. Hell, there were articles floating a couple of years ago suggesting you could park blimp on Venus above the corrosive layers of atmosphere, and conditions there could actually support a small base that would extract necessary resources from the atmosphere, and where humans would only need light shielding (+ breathing apparatus). I'm not saying building a cloud city on Venus is a good idea now, but I do think a long-duration mission to study the atmosphere would be, as data from Venus is also useful for studying climate change on Earth.
- oh_sigh 8y agoWhy does the BBC use "Nasa" instead of "NASA"?
- IanCal 8y ago>Where you would normally say the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec). http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art20130702112133530 http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201307021...
- snug 8y agoTo piggy back off this, different news outlets have their own set of rules. For example, CNET (I think) wouldn't use upper case past 4 characters Example: NASA, Nascar
- ghaff 8y agoStyle guides also tend to ignore funky punctuation, etc. in company names. For example, it was pretty standard to drop the ! in Yahoo!. There is certainly an argument for respecting the wishes of a name's owner but it's also understandable to do otherwise for readability. In this particular case, there are also a lot of acronyms that have entered such common usage (like radar) that capitalizing them would seem odd. And too many capped acronyms, Studly Caps, hyphenations etc. hurt readability after a while.
- evincarofautumn 8y agoI always like when it’s written “Yahoo!” because I read it with an alveolar click, as /jahu!/. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_clicks> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_clicks>
- ape4 8y agoUsing the capitalization the organization prefers seems like the best way to me. I'm sure they do it for people. The would not change the capitation of a Dutch last name for example.
- DogestFogey 8y agoIt would be interesting to see how the helicopter handles potential dust storms which can have winds of up to 94 km/hr.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Effect_of_dust_storms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Effect_of_dust...
- beached_whale 8y agoThat would be very interesting. I am pretty naive on the topic but one thing to keep in mind is that the force of martian wind is nothing like on earth as the atmosphere is around 1% as dense as ours. For reference, the winds in the Martian was one of the big literary devices used to help the story along but I don't think could actually happen
- pavel_lishin 8y agoAren't they pretty mild despite this, thanks to the very low density of the atmosphere?
- John_KZ 8y agoThey are, but this is a disaster waiting to happen anyway. Extremely high RPM, no redundancy in rotors or engines, flying in an environment full of dust and particles, having to land perfectly every time (or get damaged irreversibly), all these things add up to certain failure. It's definitely very cool, but it's not going to be nearly as reliable or useful as a land-based vehicle. Besides, aerial photos have generally little value for Mars (at least for the surface area such a drone can cover) because the atmosphere is clear and you can get great imagery from space. So unless they want to reach an otherwise impossible to climb location, I don't see the use for it.
- andbberger 8y ago> Besides, aerial photos have generally little value for Mars (at least for the surface area such a drone can cover) because the atmosphere is clear and you can get great imagery from space. I'm not buying your blanket statement. Atmosphere is not the only limitation - optics are heavy.
- nickhalfasleep 8y agoThe NASA Jet Propulsion Lab continues to excel at technology innovation in support of science. Make bounce landing work on another planet. Make powered landing on another planet routine. Make remove vehicle operations on another planet routine. Make soft landing with a rocket sky crane routine.
- chriskanan 8y agoVery cool. They were trying to get NASA to allow them to send it when I worked at JPL a few years ago. NASA is very nervous about anything messing up the main focus of the mission.
- KineticLensman 8y agoLink to the underlying press release [0] which has slightly more info than the BBC article. There is a bit more background about the project at [1], with some key points being: "The helicopter uses counter-rotating coaxial rotors about 1.1 m in diameter. Its payload will be a high resolution downward-looking camera for navigation, landing, and science surveying of the terrain, and a communication system to relay data to the 2020 Mars rover. The inconsistent Mars magnetic field precludes the use of a compass for navigation, so it would require a solar tracker camera integrated to JPL's visual inertial navigation system. Some additional inputs might include gyros, visual odometry, tilt sensors, altimeter, and hazard detectors. It would use solar panels to recharge its batteries." [0] https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/mars-helicopter-to-fly-on-nasa-s-next-red-planet-rover-mission https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/mars-helicopter-to-fly-on... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Mars_Helicopter_Scout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Mars_Helicopter_Scout
- chiefalchemist 8y ago"The helicopter uses counter-rotating coaxial rotors about 1.1 m in diameter..." Not to be little it but, in short, a drone. I presume the rocket scientists are jealous ;)
- sgc 8y agoOf course. It's by definition until we get someone to Mars.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoI hear ya. But at 1.1m lifting an adult human might be a struggle.
- sgc 8y agoRight, of course you got that. I just wanted to point out that we need to manage our expectations of such a headline due to the current state of technology. There is no way an earth-size helicopter is making it to Mars with current rocket capabilities. The thing is the size of a softball and requires those 1.1m rotors. A human carrying copter would be pointless it seems. They will probably use rocket powered hoppers or something along those lines
- sktrdie 8y agoSo if it falls on its side, something that has a probably a 50% chance of happening, can it get back up? I always thought that for exploring another planet, you shouldn't really use something with wheels or wings. Something different like small "jumping robots" would make a lot more sense in a place where you have literally the ability to do 0-hardware maintenance. Instead of a single expensive flying robot, why not send a fleet of these little small jumping-robots instead, to more quickly and cheaply explore the area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo
- lukas099 8y agoWhat about jumping robots makes them maintenance-free?
- azernik 8y agoWhere do you get 50% from? It's got landing legs, and will be placed right-side-up to start with by the Mars 2020 rover.
- alexozer 8y agoAll it takes is to land on the side on one rock and it's over. I would say the chance is more like 98% over the span of a few years.
- allannienhuis 8y agoVision navigation systems are pretty effective these days - 'avoid big rocks' seems like a straightforward use case for that. And clearly the landing systems would need to account for some degree of rough terrain. The wheeled drones go through a tremendous amount of testing of the various conditions they would encounter - a flying drone would go through the same engineering rigour before it was approved for the mission. Also, I believe most of the activity of these devices is planned out well in advance, so you could even add human review to some of that process. It could take a short flight for a few high-rez pictures, land right near (or exactly) where it took off from, send the pics back to earth for review to pick it's next landing spot.
- ojosilva 8y agoYou know helicopters in Mars is totally Phillip K Dick material. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_Time-Slip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_Time-Slip
- narag 8y agoA little more recent: https://youtu.be/oJGJEepIOt0?t=38 https://youtu.be/oJGJEepIOt0?t=38 It's from Red Planet (2000): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199753/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199753/
- TeMPOraL 8y agoEven more recent: https://youtu.be/vacjOrVqesM?list=RD7Oq-ClZ8Gbs&t=299 https://youtu.be/vacjOrVqesM?list=RD7Oq-ClZ8Gbs&t=299 From the series Mars (2006) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4939064/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4939064/.
- dooglius 8y agoCan't NASA test this in an artificial atmosphere low-pressure low-gravity room? Obviously there will be real-world concerns that are hard to simulate like slight damage from spacecraft landing and dust spun up when the copter takes off, but the article makes it sound like the low density is the big thing they're worried about.
- certifiedloud 8y agoSimulating dust kick-up would be easier than constructing a "low gravity" room.
- dooglius 8y agoIt isn't too hard to simulate low gravity, all you need to do is move a large aircraft in the appropriate parabolic pattern. My understanding is that this is already how NASA trains astronauts for zero-g environments, and how weightlessness is done in space movies. Adjusting the path to match Mars gravity should not be difficult.
- diplocorp 8y agoTrue, but you cannot test a small helicopter inside an aircraft, can you?
- dooglius 8y agoI don't see why not, a test that goes 10 feet up, 50 feet over, 10 feet down should be sufficient. The thing in the video looks like it could fit in a large cargo plane. Or, are you concerned about turbulance due to being in a closed space vs open atmosphere?
- caconym_ 8y agoIt might not be realistic to fly a pressure vessel large enough to simulate the low atmospheric pressure as well as the low gravity. There are probably also safety concerns; the rotors on serious R/C helicopters store enough energy to basically decapitate a human and these are probably somewhere in that neighborhood given the requirement to generate lift in Mars' atmosphere.
- m3kw9 8y agoIt will need smarts to fly and land, and land especially to save power while it awaits the next destination command. The land surveys can only see so much and if you land wrong on a even a small rock, you could get stuck top over
- dugluak 8y agoWhy not a few quadcopters like GoPro or something. I guess those are more stable and cheap.
- YaxelPerez 8y agoMy guess is a normal quadcopter doesn't have a big enough thrust to weight ratio in Mars' atmosphere.
- baddox 8y agoCan someone check my math/physics? The atmosphere on Mars is about 1.7% as dense as on Earth, meaning that a propeller on Earth will generate 58.8x more thrust than on Mars. An aircraft on Earth will weigh 2.6x of its Mars weight. Drones probably need a thrust to weight ratio of at least 1.5 to be reasonably maneuverable. A drone that has a 1.5 thrust to weight ratio on Mars would have a thrust to weight ratio of 1.5 * 58.8 / 2.6 = 33.9. That is certainly higher than hobbyist Earth drones that I’m aware of, but not terribly hard to imagine. The craziest racing quadcopters I’ve seen have power to weight ratios of around 10.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoThey're not limited to commercial constraints of price and safety, so they can build it lighter, with larger and higher-RPM propellers (to the point they would break in our atmosphere), and with less battery life. But that answers the top-level question here: you can't just ship an OTC drone to Mars and expect it to work there.
- djsumdog 8y agoThis was started years ago. There are probably already plans for the next stages and quadcopters are probably on the list of ideas. The cost of failure is so high that these ideas have to be flushed out and tested for years. There is literally no way to fix these robots once (or even if) they make it to their destinations. Not unless we figure out how to turn off gravity or invent teleportation.
- organicmultiloc 8y agoIf this is the sort of experiment that is getting space on a rocket then I kind of wonder if NASA is out of ideas. In other news, Hepatitis C is making a big comeback here in Denver. It's the sort of disease we used to laugh about being a "third world" problem back in the day. We don't use the term "third world" anymore, but we are becoming one nonetheless. I can't stop thinking about what archaeologists will think about us in a thousand years, they will struggle so much to even come up with plausible theories, much less agree on them.
- fastball 8y agoAre you a markov chain?
- organicmultiloc 8y agoYeah I get that the elite whites love NASA, so anyone daring to criticize them will be downvoted on here, but after maybe the 2000th spider web spun in microgravity maybe, just maybe, like we can start to improve human's lives now?
- weirdstuff 8y agoI think it's pretty obvious NASA does this so that we can eventually send the former middle class to Mars and make more room here.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> If this is the sort of experiment that is getting space on a rocket then I kind of wonder if NASA is out of ideas. No, it's just your imagination that's limited. This is a good idea to test on Mars. Want crazier stuff? Google Venus blimps, or go and find papers about flying supersonic aircraft on Mars. > I can't stop thinking about what archaeologists will think about us in a thousand years, they will struggle so much to even come up with plausible theories, much less agree on them. I guess you're implying we should be spending that money on Hepatitis C, to which I'll answer "no, we shouldn't", as money spent on space is pretty useful there on the margin, so you should look for sources of money elsewhere, where there's just too much of it. And if anything, archaeologists will think we've been dumb to put such absurd amounts of wealth to stupid zero sum games and entertainment, instead medical research, space exploration, and basic sciences. But that's just my guess :).
- giocampa 8y agoWell Elon has already sent a car, so a helicopter was the least they could send!
- fvdessen 8y agoDoes anybody knows what is the autonomy of this helicopter ?
- djsumdog 8y agoConsidering the lag in communication to earth, it'd have to be fully autonomous. It needs to be able to avoid obstacles, navigate visually (that article states a compass won't work with Mars's magnetic field) and find a place to land, in direct sunlight, whenever it needs to charge its batteries. I'm sure NASA has mapped out some waypoints, but there's no way to really control the actual flight remotely without a human in orbit.
- jessriedel 8y agoYea, the daily flight time (3 min) is much less than signal travel time to Earth. So the entire flight needs to be autonomous.
- tjoff 8y agoDidn't see any mention on how it will be powered, are batteries even feasable? I thought just keeping rovers warm enough to operate was quite energy consuming.
- lopmotr 8y agoIt looks like it's only going to do one brief flight, so yes, batteries probably are feasible. I'm not sure if it would require more power or less power than on Earth though since gravity is lower but so is air density for the blades to act on.
- ambicapter 8y agoDoes this make any sense? Isn't Mars' atmosphere much thinner than Earth's? Wouldn't that count against using rotary wing crafts?
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoIt’s about 1% the density of earths atmosphere. The craft would have to be light and have large blades, but that doesn’t seem impossible. The light atmosphere means huge blades could still spin fast without issue. It’s not easy but this is NASA we’re talking about. They made a sky crane to drop a Mini Cooper sized rover on Mars before.
- roywiggins 8y agoAlso gravity is about a third of Earth's, so that might help a little bit.
- caconym_ 8y agoAll heavier-than-air flight on Mars is subject to the same issue, but it's presumably still more efficient than using rockets. If it works, it works. I expect the real problems would come in scaling it up; I doubt a typical helicopter rotor/head assembly would hold together under the high head speeds needed on Mars (or you could maybe use very long blades, which comes with its own problems).
- skykooler 8y agoThe interesting thing about rotary-wing craft is that they actually work sort of independent of altitude (as long as everything stays subsonic.) As air pressure decreases, lift at a given rotor RPM decreases - but the drag on the rotor also decreases, so the RPM increases and it ends up providing the same amount of thrust. The reason helicopters on Earth haven't flown very high is not because of the rotors, but rather the engines, which require more air than is present at high altitude. For electric motors, that is not a problem.
- nanomonkey 8y ago
- wcr3 8y agoIs there any precedent for the lowercase? Seems a bit... stupid.
- pvaldes 8y agoLooks like a more efficient and much faster way to explore the area if they can solve the thinner atmosphere but, if their missions are autonomous and it seems that can't be modified in real time, what happens with the mars storms? I hope that they have a software to take measures if the air pressure or the light levels change suddenly. Couldn't the differences in temperature between shadowed and sunny areas create turbulences?
- cududa 8y agoYes to all of this but do you assume no one at NASA has thought of any of this? Weird.
- pvaldes 8y agoAm I assuming that? Where? This sort of "somebody should have thought about that (and fix it), so don't say it", is probably the safe way for people working in a big company that needs to fit in a hierarchy and please their boss. We aren't in this context and have a bigger margin to freely explore any idea and talk about it. To wonder about the dust storms is a valid question.
- microcolonel 8y agoInteresting that they didn't go the multirotor route, seems like it would cut down on development, complexity, and possibly weight. Maybe single axis counter-rotor was chosen for having a slightly better area/diameter to lift generating area ratio.