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My friend, I hope I have the pleasure of showing you, for the first time, the nuclear powered autonomous helicopter going to Titan: https://dragonfly.jhuapl.ed

My friend, I hope I have the pleasure of showing you, for the first time, the nuclear powered autonomous helicopter going to Titan: https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/ https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/ And if it's not the first time, then I hope we can both enjoy remembering this again! The hardware won't be COTS. Rarely is anything COTS that's not a tech demo / high risk experiment. I'm guessing follow-on Mars copters have a 50% chance of being COTS, but that's trending upward as Ing. lives and does good work on Mars.

ASalazarMX 5y ago
> I'm guessing follow-on Mars copters have a 50% chance of being COTS It's surprising considering that Mars radioactivity is 12 times that of Earth, and occasionally 50 times, because it doesn't have a magnetosphere. How are they hardened against cosmic radiation?
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  Well, it wouldn't be any fun if I told you that. So, I'll let the engineers tell you: https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/46229/CL%2317-6243.pdf?sequence=1 https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/46229/CL%2317... COTS components abound! In short: "[The Snapdragon] processor implements visual navigation via a velocity estimate derived from features tracked in the VGA camera, filter propagation for use in flight control, data management, command processing, telemetry generation, and radio communication. The SnapdragonTM processor is connected to two flight-control (FC) Microcontroller Units (MCU) via a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART). These MCU processor units operate redundantly, receiving and processing identical sensor data to perform the flight-control functions necessary to keep the vehicle flying in the air." They also use Zigbee radios to communicate with the rover.