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Mars Helicopter successfully completed its second flight
- jffry 6y agoIf you're curious, a press release from yesterday had more details: "This time around, we plan to trying climbing to 16 feet (5 meters) in this flight test. Then, after the helicopter hovers briefly, it will go into a slight tilt and move sideways for 7 feet (2 meters). Then Ingenuity will come to a stop, hover in place, and make turns to point its color camera in different directions before heading back to the center of the airfield to land." via https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/294/were-getting-ready-for-ingenuitys-second-flight/ https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/294/were-...
- cwkoss 6y agoKind of funny that a particular patch of the martian expanse has now been dedicated as an 'airfield'.
- caf 6y agoIt even has an ICAO airport code, JZRO.
- p1mrx 6y ago"The letters I and X are not currently used as the first letter of any ICAO identifier, and the letter J is only used in a ceremonial ICAO identifier granted to Jezero Crater on the planet Mars, JZRO." Did they just set a precedent for J as the Mars prefix?
- XorNot 6y agoYep. Nothing more permanent then temporary and all that - when Mars needs another airfield area, someone's going to Google for guidance, see that J and go "well, let's be consistent..."
- shric 6y agoHope they add it to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
- luxuryballs 6y agowe now have airfields on different planets!
- tppiotrowski 6y agoWhere are the shadows in the upper and lower right corners of the hover image coming from?
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 6y agoThese aren’t shadows but the helicopter’s legs.
- herendin2 6y agoI guess they're not shadows. They're the tips of the helicopter's legs Edit: in case it isn't clear, this a photo of the helicopter's shadow on the surface, taken by a down-facing camera in the underside of the helicopter. It has a sort of fisheye lens, so there's some distortion at edges
- WJW 6y agoLooks like the landing legs of the helicopter? Difficult to say from just this image though.
- the-dude 6y agoObviously, these are from the trusses in the studio. Must be.
- dylan604 6y agoYeah, they had to choose the correct lens though. If too wide of a lens is used, you can still see the set with the moon lander from the 60s. Your response gave me a chuckle.
- 1970-01-01 6y agoFor perspective, its not as easy as you would think. The air is extremely thin. Flying near the surface on Mars is like flying @ 100,000 ft. on Earth.
- chrisshroba 6y agoWow! I just looked up the difference in pressure and found that the "air" pressure on the surface of Mars is 155 times less that of Earth (1013.25 mbar on Earth, 6.518 mbar on Mars).
- m4rtink 6y agoYeah, that was really not expected and only found via space probes. That's why you see gliders for landing in many of the early Mars mission concepts but not in the newer ones. Actually the atmosphere is too thin for full gliding or parashute landing but too thick to ignore it like we can on the Moon. Still twice the Moons gravity with no atmospheric breaking at all would also suck I guess.
- jillesvangurp 6y agoBasically means you need a lot more delta v too slow down. Which means burning a lot more fuel to first get below escape velocity (5km/s) and then slow down all the way to zero. Escape velocity for Earth is 11km/s. ISS flies at about 7.6 km/s. A typical Mars approach and landing starts at about 20km/s. Most of that is Atmospheric braking. So yes, that would suck.
- skykooler 6y agoFrom what I remember of playing around with X-Plane's Mars atmosphere model, you can glide, but at very high speeds (for most planes close to the speed of sound), you can barely turn, and it's horribly easy to stall.
- m4rtink 6y agoDoesn't paint a good future for large scale aeronautics on Mars - even if you somehow can sustain those speeds in an atmosphere where you cant burn stuff for propulsion, landing the thing, somehow, at the destination would be very hard - possibly harder than landing the F-104 Starfighter!;-) That speed likely rules out any normal landing gear or runways, possibly with the exception of a maglev catcher cradle. Most likely the "aircraft" would need some sort of a robust long duration vertical landing capability, likely rocket based. No wonder you don't see any aircraft on Mars in The Expanse series - only hyperloop like pods on flimsy rails making use of both the low pressure and low gravity or full on spaceships or orbital shuttles.
- jackallis 6y agowhat a time to be alive.
- sixothree 6y agoI had pong as a kid. I know we dared mighty things back then too. But this is so much fun.
- sixothree 6y agoIt's endearing to think of a rover having a companion helper. I know the whole thing is impressive. But it's really hard for me to get past the awesomeness of rocket crane landing a rover on another planet. That stuff is crazy awesome.
- throwaway6734 6y agoI can't wait until we have the technical skills to land more autonomous bots to build landing pads/human liveable structures
- chasd00 6y agothat never dawned on me, you know it could be a way to start producing fuel for a return trip home too.
- dylan604 6y ago"never dawned on me" sounds like a great name for a SpaceX drone ship. I think the autonomous drones are a key component to Musk's colony plans.
- 7e 6y agoSo far NASA has been doing plenty on Mars, and Musk has done zero. He does love to talk and blow things up.
- dylan604 6y agoNASA can't remember the difference between feet and meters, and they are notorious for delay delay delay. They are also famous for blowing up some shit too. Sadly, they have even lost humans on multiple occassions. They are not perfect. Musk has a rocket that can be reused multiple times, and can deliver to the ISS. NASA can't do any of that. NASA has been around for 70 years, yet still no people on Mars. Just cute little robots that they hired others to build for them. Short Musk all you want, but he's the only one that I think will actually attempt doing things on mars than taking pictures and soil samples.
- me_me_me 6y agoCould the drone also be used as a means to dedust the rover if it was using solar panels?
- ceejayoz 6y agoI can't imagine the risk of flying in close proximity would be worth it. If you crash into the rover you could jam up the wheels or a piece of scientific equipment. We know from Spirit and Opportunity that dust on the panels isn't much of a concern; wind seems to clear them regularly.
- SamBorick 6y agoA large constraint on Spirit and Opportunity was keeping the panels clear, that's why they lasted so long. From what I remember, during martian winter they had to take the grade and the prevailing wind direction into account to keep the dust and fines off. Currently the InSight lander is going into hibernation because the solar panels haven't really gotten cleaned in 3 years: https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-mars-insight-lander-limits-operations-due-to-dusty-solar-panels/ https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-mars-insight-lander-limits-op...
- LunarRover 6y agoIt's already been three years? Feels like a few months ago. Wow. Still can't believe we've got proof of Marsquakes - that alone turned the consensus on planetary geology upside down.
- MengerSponge 6y agoThe dust is electrostatically charged, and the atmosphere is extremely thin. It probably wouldn't help. I imagine a tuned laser could ablate the dust, but that's a very expensive way to recover a solar panel!
- jffry 6y agoThe Perseverance rover is using a plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoeletric generator (RTG) this time that I think is rated to provide something like 100 watts for something like 15 years. For the solar panels on the Ingenuity helicopter, it's my understanding that the flights do already help keep them clean. Ingenuity is highly experimental, but even for a future Mars helicopter I doubt they would risk flying it in close proximity to the rover.
- code4you 6y agoWhat is NASA hoping to learn from this drone that they couldn't get from the rover? Is the point just to test if this type of flight is possible on Mars, or is the rover collecting some extra observations?
- justapassenger 6y agoIt’s technology demonstration. It’s not really used for science, other than learning how to fly there.
- snypher 6y agoIt's main task is as a technology demonstration, after it's time or power budget is expended the rover will continue with it's scientific mission.
- 1970-01-01 6y agoA flight envelope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_envelope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_envelope
- ceejayoz 6y agoThis one's a technology demo. Future ones might be able to peek over a rock/ridge for planning purposes or access an inaccessible cliff or small crater that's dangerous to rove into.
- dylan604 6y agoIs the data collected by MRO not useful for this as well? Sure, the resolution would be increased, so I guess that would have some benefits. I tend to think of the rover and drone like one of those strategy games where you have to send out scouts to "discover" where to send the rest of the troops, and then plan out how many "moves" to do it in. But then I remember we have the MRO that has pretty much scouted the entire planet. It just takes us a lot of "moves" to get our troops there.
- LunarRover 6y ago
- MontagFTB 6y agoIn all the downward-facing images from Ingenuity, I find it surprising that the rotor blades have a lighter shadow than the rest of the helicopter. I asked about this on Twitter and was told the sensor for each pixel isn't fully shielded from light. The fast-moving rotor blades allow for latent light to enter into the sensor during the image scan, causing the rotor blade itself to appear slightly lighter. [1] [1]: https://twitter.com/sdamico/status/1384205372668350465 https://twitter.com/sdamico/status/1384205372668350465
- Miraste 6y ago> it’s identical to the Google Project Tango SLAM camera module That's fascinating, I would've guessed it had a special radiation-hardened camera like the processor.
- meepmorp 6y agoIt’s using an off the shelf Snspdragon CPU. The whole helicopter is made with COTS parts.
- Miraste 6y agoOh, I meant on the rover. From googling, it seems the helicopter's design lifetime is too short for radiation damage to matter, and the cameras actually on the rover are rad-hardened to some degree.
- ixfo 6y agoGenerally cameras are reasonably rad-hard because the pixel size dictates a lot of the wiring size (and puts a lower bound on the process size). 3.5um pixels don't play well with 5nm features. Bigger features are generally more resistant to radiation fun.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoRad hard cameras intended for long term operation use CCDs with the drivers and ADCs off chip, implemented in a hardened process.
- fiftyacorn 6y agoYou wouldn't want to be the one who crashes this
- wongarsu 6y agoThe communication delay between earth and mars in 9 minutes at the lowest, 42 minutes when the planets are far apart. If something is crashing the helicopter then it's a software bug.
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoAs someone who writes software, the fact that it must be a bug is scant consolation when it crashes. It just means that you have no hope to prevent it by reflex, you had to fix it by thinking intentionally and carefully a long time ago when you wrote the software.
- thelean12 6y agoAs someone who has written robot software, it's not as bad as you might think. You do a LOT of testing before hand, and you do system checks before committing to something. I was always more worried about sensor failures that my software doesn't pick up on. Then again none of my robots ever cost $80 million dollars and has landed on Mars...
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoI have written robot software...curious what context you were in. I've been doing industrial automation with commercial robot arms, where testing is mostly functional and there's very few system checks. You're basically jogging the robot with the teach pendant, recording points, and reading digital IO. There are minimal system checks, simulation is mostly to make sure the cell CAD layout is reachable and less to verify that things are working correctly. Version control is completely offline, there's not even an "undo" feature to revert a touched up point unless you underwent a tedious and slow backup procedure. That said, like you, none of my robots cost more than 6 figures, and they're all permanently anchored to terrestrial steel and concrete...
- temptemptemp111 6y agoHAHAHAHAH amazing that "engineers" believe this! Epic.
- foxylad 6y agoHow do you control attitude with just two contra-rotating rotors? I've Googled, but can't find an answer. Extra points for why NASA chose this mode, and terrestrial drones don't?
- duffmancd 6y agoThere is a little more information in this hackaday article [1]. Both propellers have swashplates like a helicopter which allows them to control the pitch of each rotor. [1] https://hackaday.com/2020/09/02/an-up-close-look-at-the-first-martian-helicopter/ https://hackaday.com/2020/09/02/an-up-close-look-at-the-firs...
- dirkt 6y agoThis video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM explains it: they can change the attack angle of rotor blades for different positions, which produces a torque, though you have to compensate for the gyroscopic effect, which lags behind. Humans cannot fly this, but computers can. The video also explains why the chose two contra-rotating rotors instead of a quad-copter design.
- pvaldes 6y agoNeeds more flashing bulbs; martian raptors are shy and will not be lured easily.
- bluepoint 6y agoI am paranoid probably, but I am worried that the helicopter might crash on to the car.
- laacz 6y agoI know it's 21st century, but my mind is still blown when I see video from the surface of another planet.