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NASA loses contact with Ingenuity Mars helicopter
- throwup238 3y agoRun! Go! Get to the choppa, Perseverance! I've been saving that one for years.
- chiph 3y agoThey should definitely drive the rover to see what happened. Question: Can Ingenuity autorotate to a landing in the Martian atmosphere?
- beej71 3y agoI'd bet no, given how thin the atmosphere is and how fast they have to spin the rotors to stay aloft.
- dredmorbius 3y agoFrom TFA: "Perseverance is currently out of line-of-sight with Ingenuity, but the team could consider driving closer for a visual inspection," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages both robots' missions, said via X on Friday. Close inspection may not be advisable due to difficult terrain: <https://mastodon.social/@65dBnoise/111789132803382896 https://mastodon.social/@65dBnoise/111789132803382896>
- zokier 3y agoThere seems to be some spots almost directly south (-southeast) from the landing site (300-400m away maybe?) that look like they would be reachable without descending down to the riverbed and ripples. And I think that's the general direction Percy is going towards anyways (mostly west), so it wouldn't even be a huge detour to go check it out. I'd guess it would be mostly matter of how good of a path would be available there, but eyeballing it seems relatively benign.
- secondcoming 3y agoHow do they know where it really is? There's no GPS on Mars. Couldn't winds have blown it off course each time they flew it?
- dotnet00 3y agoIt has cameras, they'd be able to compare terrain features against photos from Perseverance and flyovers by MRO.
- dredmorbius 3y agoInteresting question. Principally image-based location tracking, though also with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and laser rangefinder, all off-the-shelf components. See: "How Ingenuity Knows Where It Is And Where It's Going" <https://picknik.ai/slam/localization/state%20estimation/mars%20helicopter/2021/05/10/Ingenuity.html https://picknik.ai/slam/localization/state%20estimation/mars...>
- tedivm 3y agoThis is pretty sad but also pretty amazing. The original plan was for five flights of around 90 seconds each, and it looks like it finally failed on flight 72 with a total from all flights of two hours, eight minutes and eighteen seconds of flight time. All of this in an extremely thin atmosphere.
- roughly 3y agoNASA’s got a history of their rovers overperforming like this. Between this and Webb, it’s hard to argue they’re not the best out there.
- jasonpeacock 3y agoIt's less about being the best (no criticism of NASA) but rather engineering decisions to _guarantee_ the planned mission, which means you over-engineer and thus get extra performance/reliability. You're not willing to accept the statistical risk that may end a mission early.
- WalterBright 3y agoSince it doesn't need to be man-rated, spend less trying to make it perfect, and instead make more copies.
- roughly 3y agoI agree that it's not strictly that NASA engineers are better engineers, but I do think there's part of this that's both cultural and becomes actual capability - I think even if you gave most engineering organizations the budget and mandate that NASA has, they still wouldn't be able to pull off something like Webb because they don't have the practice of it*. Capacity both builds and atrophies over time, and most places don't work to that standard often enough to maintain the capability to do so even if they wanted to. (*I don't necessarily mean the practice of shooting a rocket into space and launching a telescope, but the ability to build an object that can perform that exactly to its specifications under those kinds of circumstances.)
- jncfhnb 3y agoIt’s kind of hard to imagine a river without life. Life seems so quintessential to the mental image of a river.
- KyleBerezin 3y agoCheck out photos of the Onyx river in Antartica.
- jncfhnb 3y agoStill full of microorganisms and algae it seems like. Seems like it also passes some areas with greenery.
- robotnikman 3y agoIts surprising how long those electronics lasted considering they were just regular off the shelf components and not rad-hardened
- wolverine876 3y agoWhy wouldn't they use better than off-the-shelf components for job like this one? That doesn't seem like a money-saving decision.
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- dylan604 3y agoWhat if part of the experiment was to test the viability of COTS parts?
- wolverine876 3y agoWas it?
- dylan604 3y agoIt is now
- wolverine876 3y agoIt apparently was the whole time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39075315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39075315
- dotnet00 3y agoThey used off-the-shelf components because they were low priority, low cost side projects that were not expected to last long anyway. Similarly, the video (and associated audio which malfunctioned) of the skycrane-deployed landing was done by COTS components which otherwise would not have been present at all. Also, by COTS, they're using components which would otherwise be meant for industrial use, so they're still likely to be more rugged than what might come to mind when thinking of off the shelf components.
- roughly 3y agoSomehow I forgot we’re flying a helicopter on Mars. For all the other bullshit we do as a species, we do get up to some pretty neat stuff, too.
- Loughla 3y agoIt's astounding to me that we're capable of flying a remote vehicle on a literally other planet, but we also kill each other in large numbers over whose god is correct. Genuinely astounding to me, and slightly disappointing.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoWe kill for lots of reasons, some as trivial as wanting the pocket change another person has on them.
- c22 3y agoNo doubt someday we'll be killing people on other planets with remote vehicles.
- OmarShehata 3y ago"killing each other over whose god is correct" is a profound misunderstanding of humanity. That's not why humans kill each other now, or in any time in history. It is and always has been simple & rational game theory: fear of the other tribe killing you for your resources, or just simply because they're afraid you might kill them for _their_ resources. For example, this is (one of) the core reasons of why peace in Israel/Palestine is so hard (each side fears accepting sovereignty of the other side means they will continue to encroach and wipe them out). Humans are pretty clever and ingenious at all levels
- wolverine876 3y agoThat's true sometimes, but sometimes people just want to take what their neighbors have. Russia's government faced no risk of Ukraine attacking, or NATO for that matter. They just wanted Ukraine.
- ChrisBland 3y agoIt has lost contact before and come back online. Sometimes the communications signals can get blocked, expect the rover to more closer to get a visual and attempt to establish contact. If the helicopter lost signal it goes into an auto land mode similar to what drones do when they lose signal.
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- NooneAtAll3 3y agoI'll be waiting for Mars Guy[1] video before forming an opinion It has already happened before, when the helicopter flew far ahead of the rover and just stayed there until rover caught up [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@MarsGuy https://www.youtube.com/@MarsGuy
- wolverine876 3y agoWhy should we trust 'Mars Guy'?
- NooneAtAll3 3y agobecause he spent years - since the Perseverance landing - covering this mission and all status updates I trust dedicated journalist more than generalist run-by ones that clickbait another working moment like it's the end of the world
- hyperthesis 3y agooblig. https://xkcd.com/695/ https://xkcd.com/695/
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- breput 3y agoContact has been re-established[0] although the state of Ingenuity isn't known yet. Still, very encouraging news. [0] https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281 https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281
- slantaclaus 3y agoIt is almost impossible to take space.com seriously with the ad bombardment (to wit: a 4s looping gif declaring “natures adderall is taking over the internet” with a woman and her tincture, shoveling the snow out of her driveway almost instantly)
- foobarbecue 3y agoI'm on the Ingenuity team, but info needs to come through offical channels, so I'll just point out the announcement: https://x.com/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281?s=20 https://x.com/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281?s=20 For those who would rather not go to x.com, the text is: Good news today: We've reestablished contact with the #MarsHelicopter after instructing @NASAPersevere to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal. The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout during Flight 72.
- kurtoid 3y agoHell yeah. Congrats!
- 7373737373 3y agoNASA seems to be on Mastodon as well, but has stopped posting (?)
- consumer451 3y ago> For those who would rather not go to x.com Also, replacing the domain with nitter.net always works. https://nitter.net/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281#m https://nitter.net/NASAJPL/status/1748883252604236281#m
- Jenk 3y agoI use plugin for FF (also chrome) that does this automatically. Can be configured to use any nitter instance: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect
- sandyarmstrong 3y agoI use the LibRedirect extension for this.