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After six months on Mars, NASA's tiny copter is still flying high
- fao_ 5y agoJesus, has it been six months already? What is this hell world.
- Incerto 5y agoIt’s been six months already? How time flies…
- secfirstmd 5y agoWell it's been nearly 11 months in Martian time... :)
- gshubert17 5y agoBut Mars takes 1.88 earth years to make one orbit. So, 6 earth months is closer to 3/12 of a Martian year.
- unknownOrigin 5y agoYea, same reaction, I had to double check it's true. Damn, we're getting old.
- dTal 5y agoOnly 4 and a bit months since its first flight though, when it was all over the news.
- neals 5y agoDo we have any amazing pictures from it?
- amelius 5y agoHalf of the pictures on the NASA website are rendered mockups. I don't know which ones are real anymore.
- tokai 5y agoThey always write in the image description if it is an illustration or not. Or use the raw image library https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/
- stohk 5y agoIngenuity only has one downward facing color camera and b/w nav cam. None of them are particularly amazing but its just a tech demo. You can see all the images here, https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/
- nisegami 5y agoSeeing color pictures from another planet's surface is one of the things that always fills me with awe.
- jffry 5y agoDepends on your threshold for amazing. It's a lot of pictures of rocks since they're cameras for navigation. On the other hand they're aerial views of another planet taken by a helicopter during autonomous flight. One notable photo was on Ingenuity's third flight, where it happened to get the Perseverance rover and landing area together in one frame: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25862/ingenuity-spots-perseverance-from-the-air/ https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25862/ingenuity-spots-persev... There is also the NASA blog just covering Ingenuity, which has some more notable photos along with explanations: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/ https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/
- danhor 5y agoMaybe after the shift from space-grade parts to commodity parts in (some) satellites, this will mean the same for parts of future mars missions. A Snapdragon 801 as used here is certainly much cheaper, easier to work with and powerful than anything space-grade.
- DrNuke 5y agoIt really depends on the space environmental work conditions, though… that’s the fundamental trigger for space grade quality.
- nisegami 5y agoFrom my limited knowledge of electronics-in-space, isn't ECC memory a hard requirement to correct for bit flips due to solar radiation/particles? But DDR5 having ECC be standard across the board may make this a non-issue.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoKinda, yes, but at the same time, servers here on earth have moved away from (expensive) ECC in favor of resilient software, disconnected services (job queue based) and redundancy. Cheaper to have a dozen computers that sometimes break than three with lower risk (but they still break).
- zitterbewegung 5y agoFor consumers no but for things like large simulations or even deep learning you want to have ECC memory. Intel only enables it on Xeons but AMD doesn't officially support it on their consumer chips but sometimes it works.
- my123 5y agoIt's locked down on AMD customer APUs, only not forcefully disabled on AMD customer CPUs that do not have integrated graphics. (Ryzen PRO parts have it officially supported)
- ForHackernews 5y agoThis is a good lesson in under-promise, over-deliver. NASA seem to be masters of that technique.
- cheschire 5y agoI always took it to be a budget defense method since they never get as much money as they as for, and have to expertly manage expectations to ensure they continue getting the “little” money they do. Little is quoted because it’s a hotly debated and subjective word.
- ISL 5y agoI saw first-hand how it comes to pass, from collaborating with NASA engineers years ago. In order to ensure that a critical mission-goal is met, with, say, 95% confidence, every subcomponent must be much more reliable, as there will be many ways to fail. The net effect is that often the overall perceived reliability turns out to be much better than the requirement. This is especially so for systems that have already achieved some measure of success, as a number of those subcomponents will have already done their jobs completely.
- dtech 5y agoI suspect it's because of a solid physical engineering culture. They probably have enormous safety factors and redundancies or work-arounds, since you can't change anything physically once it's launched. So if things go alright, those provide lifespan far beyond specifications.
- Camillo 5y agoEh, at this point it's a boy crying wolf situation. Whenever there's a new space gizmo you know they're going to say "we only designed it to work for eight minutes", and then six months later it'll still be chugging along, because the actual design life was measured in years. They could at least say "the doodad is designed to work for two years, but there's a 5% chance that it'll be DOA, because so many things can go wrong in space". That would be more realistic.
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- coldcode 5y agoI wonder what the upper limit on weight will be. The article mentioned multiple kilograms being possible in the future.
- _joel 5y agoHave a swarm instead/as well, much more capable at covering range.
- zokier 5y agoJPL is planning already much bigger copters: > The current MSH concept has a mass of about 31 kg and a total diameter of just over four meters, with six rotors each sporting a quartet of 0.64 meter blades https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-next-mars-helicopter https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-next-mars-helicopter
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- 10GBps 5y agoInteresting craft in that it's essentially just a larger version of the R/C toys you can buy. I wonder how they tested the blade design. Did they fly it at 100,000ft on Earth?
- dtgriscom 5y agoFour words: really big vacuum chamber.
- londons_explore 5y agoI assume it was tested in a pressure chamber on earth to simulate the pressure and composition of Mars atmosphere. Obviously it wouldn't be able to fly in the pressure chamber due to increased gravity, but by suspending it on elastic you can still test that the blade functions as intended. The only bit you can't really fully test is the constants for the control loops in the flight control algorithm, but I assume they chose them with a lot of stability margin.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago> I assume it was tested in a pressure chamber on earth... by suspending it on elastic you can still test that the blade functions as intended They did exactly that. NASA has a big (adjustable) vacuum chamber for this kind of purpose. This comment links to video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432811
- _Microft 5y agoIt did fly in the vacuum chamber. It was a tethered flight and the difference between Earth‘s and Mars‘s gravity was compensated by an appropriate pull being applied to the tether.
- TotempaaltJ 5y agoJust a vacuum chamber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMCJGfwj3rY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMCJGfwj3rY
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- foobar1962 5y ago> ... still flying high Shirley you must be joking!
- robin_reala 5y agoOne of the most interesting things about Ingenuity is the amount of standard open-source code used. Github has a badge for if you contributed code to a project used by it, and they put up an explanatory page at https://github.com/readme/featured/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter https://github.com/readme/featured/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter.
- eric__cartman 5y agoHaving that badge would give anyone very cool bragging rights about how they wrote software that's running on Mars. It makes perfect sense that NASA used a lot of open source software for this. If some high quality, widely used and tested code already exists, why not use it instead of trying to reinvent everything?
- burundi_coffee 5y ago> If some high quality, widely used and tested code already exists, why not use it instead of trying to reinvent everything? This is precisely the spirit of free software and the motivation behind movements like public money public code. Govermnets immensely overpay for software (projects).
- dimator 5y agoI highly doubt it's running on Mars. For one thing, sibling comment has a list of repos that have the badge, and it's a lot of python packages. I suspect it's more along the eath-based infrastructure and data processing side of the equation. Still a pretty cool get, though.
- heavyset_go 5y agoApparently some of the non-mission critical experimental components that were sent to Mars run your standard Linux systems with some Python software, as well. I believe I heard in an interview with a NASA engineer that they were using Python for ML and scripting.
- stavros 5y ago
- unnouinceput 5y agoQuote: "NASA is planning to retrieve those samples during a future mission—sometime in the 2030s. " Not if Musk gets his rocket filled with 100 people on Mars in next years. Then you'll have a better way to do science on that soil.
- jackcosgrove 5y agoCan't wait for a successor to Ingenuity to capture aerial video during its flights.
- kokey 5y agoI think people who fly tiny whoop quadcopters would find the description of a 1.8kg copter as 'tiny' quite amusing. I'm guessing the primary driver for the weight is the power to lift this in the thin atmosphere, secondary to that the weight of the strong materials used to make it durable.
- azernik 5y agoNot just the power to keep it up, but also the rotors. Not sure how heavy Earth quadcopter rotors are as a proportion of total vehicle weight, but the Ingenuity ones are absolutely enormous.
- juliendorra 5y agoAbout the size: the blades are really huge "in person" (in VR :-) I added both the Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity to our VR puzzle game Peco Peco[0], and I was totally surprised both times by how bigger than I thought they were. (Players can assemble the puzzle for Ingenuity at full scale, and at both full scale and 1/3rd of scale for the rover) So if you have a VR headset, I highly suggest to find a way to discover Ingenuity at full scale in VR. [0] https://pecopecogame.com/ https://pecopecogame.com/
- RobotCaleb 5y agoThat looks cool! How do I play it if I don't like giving Facebook any data?
- fukmbas 5y agoHow about a picture next to a banana? Jeez...
- Causality1 5y agoIt's incredible to me they managed to get it to fly at all considering how thin mars' atmosphere is.
- ruchin_k 5y agoSaw this Veritasium youtube video a year ago and the technical complexity required to fly on Mars was shocking to me. Since the air density is super low the blades need to spin at a speed which nears the speed of sound at the blade tips. Crossing the speed of sound causes mini sonic booms which could disrupt the flight entirely. Kudos to NASA scientists for this technological breakthrough! Sharing the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM