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While I love the amazing engineering that goes into getting a helicopter onto Mars, the pace things are tried at is frustratingly slow. While I'm sure in part i

While I love the amazing engineering that goes into getting a helicopter onto Mars, the pace things are tried at is frustratingly slow. While I'm sure in part it's to ensure nothing goes wrong/not risk it, can someone speculate as to why it takes so long to get to a basic test flight? Surely all the SW and HW issues were well tested before launch, so why does it take weeks to be ready to fly after landing?

aeternum 6y ago
Agreed, I really hope this isn't the result of design by committee where each team adds a long list of tests because no one wants to be the one that didn't test something and lost the vehicle. In software teams, I've seen this issue of too many tests really cripple teams and result in frequent false-positives and products that never make it out the door. Hopefully that's not the case here.
pengaru 6y ago
Presumably simply letting time pass in every step's state along this process is gathering meaningful data. Jumping directly to "well we crashed the helicopter" would deprive you of answering questions like "how does the solar collector perform there?" "how are the heaters performing day after day?" "how does the helicopter fare resting on the surface throughout the varying conditions?" "Can we see a dust storm's effects on the airframe at rest and solar panels before flight maybe?" "how are the communications going? are they reliable in a dust storm?" That's just off the top of my head... Don't forget Ingenuity is primarily a tech demo and learning mission, they're just gathering data and informing future flight-centric missions. I think it's obvious that you'd leverage every pre-flight step as much as you possibly can, since flight has such a high risk of destroying the vehicle.
- oalae5niMiel7qu 6y ago
  > "Can we see a dust storm's effects on the airframe at rest and solar panels before flight maybe?" This one in particular would have been kind of risky, since one thing that happens to airframes left to sit in windy conditions with no tie-down is that they get blown over.
  - pengaru 6y ago
    Apparently the atmosphere on Mars is too thin for that to be plausible.
sys_64738 6y ago
You can do all the testing you want but ultimately there will always be an edge case out in the field that has some scenario. That’s when a service tech can be called out. Here, not so much, so you need to quadruple check everything and then some.

aeternum 6y ago

Agreed, I really hope this isn't the result of design by committee where each team adds a long list of tests because no one wants to be the one that didn't test something and lost the vehicle. In software teams, I've seen this issue of too many tests really cripple teams and result in frequent false-positives and products that never make it out the door. Hopefully that's not the case here.

pengaru 6y ago

Presumably simply letting time pass in every step's state along this process is gathering meaningful data. Jumping directly to "well we crashed the helicopter" would deprive you of answering questions like "how does the solar collector perform there?" "how are the heaters performing day after day?" "how does the helicopter fare resting on the surface throughout the varying conditions?" "Can we see a dust storm's effects on the airframe at rest and solar panels before flight maybe?" "how are the communications going? are they reliable in a dust storm?" That's just off the top of my head... Don't forget Ingenuity is primarily a tech demo and learning mission, they're just gathering data and informing future flight-centric missions. I think it's obvious that you'd leverage every pre-flight step as much as you possibly can, since flight has such a high risk of destroying the vehicle.

oalae5niMiel7qu 6y ago
> "Can we see a dust storm's effects on the airframe at rest and solar panels before flight maybe?" This one in particular would have been kind of risky, since one thing that happens to airframes left to sit in windy conditions with no tie-down is that they get blown over.
- pengaru 6y ago
  Apparently the atmosphere on Mars is too thin for that to be plausible.

sys_64738 6y ago

You can do all the testing you want but ultimately there will always be an edge case out in the field that has some scenario. That’s when a service tech can be called out. Here, not so much, so you need to quadruple check everything and then some.