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NASA's helicopter survives first freezing night on Mars
- BitwiseFool 6y agoDoes anyone know if Perseverance is capable of recording video? I know it has several cameras but I can't figure out if it can actually record footage of Ingenuity taking flight.
- lgrebe 6y agoAFAIK it’s possible and will save to an on-rover disk. The current limit to seeing that footage here on earth is the downlink bandwidth limit. So far it’s been used for more „interesting“ data and still images.
- pohl 6y agoYes, it is https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/mastcam-z/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/mastca...
- BitwiseFool 6y agoThank you, for some reason I had a lot of trouble with Google when trying to find this answer. It kept returning results about the video taken by the skycrane, not the rover itself.
- mlyle 6y agoNote that most of that video is taken by the rover itself, watching the skycrane fly off etc. Indeed, we don't have any video from the skycrane after touchdown, because I believe that data was fed over an umbilical to the rover before being sent to the low orbit (I'd typed LEO, but I guess I mean "LMO") satellites and back to Earth.
- aeternum 6y agoHave they posted any videos yet? Somewhat disappointing that so far it's only been images with really poor UI/UX via the NASA site. That's not how you capture the public's imagination. I also don't see why they are waiting so long to do the flight, why risk even waiting until nightfall for the batteries to get too cold or for dust to get into the electronics/mechanics?
- mlyle 6y ago> Have they posted any videos yet? An amazing one. Most of driving along at 1MPH on a barren landscape is incredibly boring, but... https://youtu.be/4czjS9h4Fpg?t=10 https://youtu.be/4czjS9h4Fpg?t=10 > I also don't see why they are waiting so long to do the flight Because there's a couple dozen steps that are each irrevocable involved in uncovering, unfolding, deploying, and then flying this thing... and that they want to make sure everything is perfect between each one and that comms still worked before cutting umbilicals, etc, because you can't just plug it back in.
- aeternum 6y agoVery cool video, thanks for sharing
- ghaff 6y ago>I also don't see Maybe, just maybe, the domain experts involved know something you don't. Just a theory.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoTo be fair, maybe the OP was hoping they'd provide an explanation as to why. I have the same question too and I don't presume to be smarter than they are.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoIt’s probably a bandwidth problem and they probably have more important things to do transmit than videos. Although I think a little bit of Showbusiness is probably good for NASA.
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- kshacker 6y ago"Survives first freezing night" == Is this just sensationalism? Should NASA not have a good estimate of what the chances of survival are? Maybe it is the media, maybe it is the need to fill columns (like the old days) but I would probably make a list of milestones and track "time to first flight" or something similar.
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- qchris 6y agoThis is a technology demonstration of a novel robotics system build using many off-the-shelf parts, on a planet with night-time temperatures as low as -130F [1]. Ingenuity survived, literally, a first freezing night. That is an accomplishment by itself, and is hardly sensationalist. [1] As linked in the article: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/288/its-cold-on-mars/ https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/288/its-c...
- mseepgood 6y ago> on a planet with night-time temperatures as low as -130F For anyone reading this: -130F is -90°C
- galacticaactual 6y agoIt is literally a milestone on a list of milestones. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/mars_2020/launch/mission/spacecraft/experimental_technologies/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/mars_2020/launch/mi...
- whimsicalism 6y agoWow, reading the first comment I would think that this was planned. It literally is the third thing on a list of "milestones."
- amelius 6y agoI find the order of milestones a little surprising. Why didn't they test the survival of the freezing cold after testing the rotor blades, lift-off and perhaps a short flight in the vicinity of the rover?
- maxwoj 6y ago“130 degrees Fahrenheit” - seriously? What else, pounds and feet?
- js2 6y agoThe article is written for an American audience. We use Fahrenheit here. That said, -130°F is so beyond what any American can relate to, I agree the article should use C and provide the -130°F in a parenthetical. Amusingly, the article does just that later on: > During the first flight, the helicopter will attempt to rise about 10 feet (3 meters) in the air from the middle of its flat 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) airfield... p.s. -90°C
- aksss 6y agoI think Americans would relate to -90C even less. Many Americans are used to thinking about sub-zero temperatures, it seems less of a burden to conceptualize a really low temperature on the scale you're used to than to conceptualize a really low temperature on a completely different measuring system. The first question most Americans would ask is "What's the equiv of -90 in F?".
- Sharlin 6y agoIncidentally, –90°C/–130°F happens to be almost exactly the lowest natural temperature measured on Earth (–89.2°C, in Antarctica in 1982).
- sleavey 6y agoOut of curiosity, what do Americans mean when they say "sub-zero"? 0°C or 0°F?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago0°F.
- ceejayoz 6y ago0°F. "Below freezing" would be below 0°C/32°F.
- londons_explore 6y agoMaking electronics work at a very high or low temperature is a challenge. You normally have to decide between custom-designing all components to work at the extreme temperature, or to figure out how to use off the shelf stuff, yet insulate them from the environmental temperature. More and more designs are choosing the latter, although notable exceptions are LED light bulbs (which use special components rated to operate for years at ~150 Celcuis)
- robomartin 6y agoI haven't worked on anything related to Mars but have worked on the preliminary design of a camera system for the Artemis Moon mission. Thermal design can be both surprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult. If the mission profile is cold-biased it's an "easy" matter of judiciously adding heating and insulation (to retain heat). Here "easy" is in quotes because nothing is trivial or truly easy in space. If you have to deal with temperatures beyond the maximum thermal range of the design, sometimes the "easy" solution (again, in quotes) is to schedule shutdowns or duty cycle around thermal conditions. The power-down storage temperature of most devices is much higher than operating limits. Yes, you would need hardware that can deal with extremes in order to wake everything back up. That's where the rad-hard $300K microprocessors come into the fold. At the same time, you'd be surprised how well some non-rad hard hardware can do in space. There are imaging satellites that basically use qualified COTS imaging sensors quite successfully. The case is similar for dealing with radiation. Don't turn things on until you have to and, when you do, if you can, limit operating time to the absolute minimum. There's a lot more to the art and science of making things for space, of course. Everything out there is actively trying to kill everything you send out there 100% of the time.
- jacurtis 6y agoEspecially rechargeable batteries (that the helicopter uses), which not only discharge under extreme temperatures (especially cold), but also degrade in capacity over time. Maybe JPL has overcome those with some new battery tech, but extreme temperatures have always been the vain of engineers who have to design technology for cold weather. It'll be interesting to see if multiple cold-weather days or years eventually kill the batteries off. This helicopter only flies for 90 seconds at a time already. If the batteries degrade by 30%, we are talking about sub-minute flight times.
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- iheart2code 6y agoI've been trying to find out what communication protocols are being used between the rover and helicopter. I've seen on Wikipedia that it's supposedly Zigbee, but the source material referenced doesn't mention Zigbee. Does anyone know how this is working?
- ojbyrne 6y agoWikipedia links to this (search for "Zig-Bee"): https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_AIAA2018_0023.pdf https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...
- gillytech 6y agoProbably should link to the official JPL article and not an entertainment company's version. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-mars-helicopter-survives-first-cold-martian-night-on-its-own https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-mars-helicopter-survives...
- slicktux 6y agoEmphasis on “entertainment company”...
- idiotsecant 6y agoYou just repeated the thing.
- truthr 6y agoJust a reminder: that helicopter is running Linux.