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Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again
- lovemenot 3y agoIngenuity? Pah! Couldn't it MacGyver a fix for the damaged blade, using materials at hand? Seriously though, great job you plucky little 'copter.
- throwelon 3y ago[flagged]
- TheCoreh 3y agoI wonder why they only sent one? Why couldn't they send 3-5 identical helicopters so they still had a few more to spare? (The hover weights ~1000kg, the helicopter ~1kg)
- foobarbecue 3y agoIngenuity was designed to fit under the rover, and occupied the available volume pretty completely. Check out the video of how it was deployed. Even if a multiple deployment system could be designed and the budget was available, there would probably need to be changes to the rover (which is based on Curiosity's design), and these things tend to make cost and complexity balloon. But, redundancy would be nice -- Mars Sample Return helicopter proposes a pair of helicopters.
- nexawave-ai 3y agoMaybe sometime in the future NASA will deploy a service or repair pit stop station for all their crafts on Mars. Imagine that, if a craft is damaged another automaton is deployed to retrieve the damaged craft where it is transported to the pit stop to be fixed or for routine maintenance. This will improve service life and only the service station would need manual intervention ie. Restocking for parts. So you would have a service station and a manufacturing station, that's nuclear powered and retrofitted with a 3D printer that can produce custom crafts on Mars. I often ponder about what will the result be of having a human colony on Mars or the Moon? Think about the ethical implications, what about if someone commits a murder? Or breaks a law ( will there even be laws? Who creates the law? Who will deliver judgement? Will there be a jury? ) it just breaks my mind.
- foobarbecue 3y agoI highly recommend the book A City on Mars, which explores these topics in a humorous, but well-researched, light.
- RugnirViking 3y agoI don't know a lot about these missions. Does the rover have a sample gathering arm? would it be possible for the helicopter to be picked up and set onto something? or carried around? seems like it would be useful to have the backup connection route to the rover like when they used the helicopter to troubleshoot the rover a while back. Or alternatively even as a backup sensor suite for the rover. Plus the imagery of the rover carrying around its wounded little friend is too nice to pass up on
- foobarbecue 3y agoI like your creative thinking. Perseverance does have an arm with a drill, cameras, dust puffer, rock grinder, and spectrometers at the end. However, Ingenuity is deep in a dune field which Perseverance can't drive into. The rover is too heavy to safely drive in deep sand -- it would get stuck.
- ZaoLahma 3y agoI remember watching the youtube stream when it took its first flight 2 years ago. I still get goosebumps when the engineers analyze the flight logs and confirm that it was successful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1KolyCqICI&t=2251s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1KolyCqICI&t=2251s
- penjelly 3y agoso what type of missions could this reliably be used for in the future that justify the cost? it seems it flew for ~2 hours which seems expensive and risky to me? I know the craft was relatively cheap and the experiment was worth doing but going forward with mars, can we use these effectively somehow?
- penjelly 3y agonvm these craft are super inexpensive and obviously can get access to areas rovers cant
- Agsded 3y agoApparently the computer on ingenuity is tons more powerful than anything ever sent to space. Will they be able to utilize that processing power for any other purpose on mars? Just cause it is no longer airworthy, doesn’t mean it’s totally dead.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago72 flights is a lot for an experimental craft, on Mars, running Linux.
- gokhan 3y agoDamage to the blade tip is apparent in the shadow. But I would try one more flight just to see how it fares in such conditions, if it can be corrected in software etc.
- jtriangle 3y agoMight as well yolo it at this point
- dfcab 3y agoHad the same thought but then wondered if the damage would cause vibration which would then lead to other issues.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoBudget-wise, it's not worth trying anything else. There is a lot of prop damage here: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/e1-pia26243-ingenuity-spots-the-shadow-of-its-damaged-rotor-blade.jpg https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/e1-pia26243-...
- rtkwe 3y agoTo fly Ingenuity has to spin it's propellers very quickly due to the lower atmospheric density compared to Earth and that's a large chunk taken out of the blade. We can already guess what'll happen without testing it and it'll be some variation of the craft shaking itself to pieces and throwing debris all over that chunk of Mars. Better to just let it sit than toss all sorts of trash across the surface that could hit the rover.
- LorenPechtel 3y agoYup. I get the impression this was a forced landing, it put itself down on too steep a slope and caused a rotor strike. Helicopters do not like unbalanced rotors! And think of what happens if it fails at speed: The rotors are 4' across, so 2' from tip to hub. 2,400 rpm for the low end of flight speed. That's 40 rotations per second, the average speed of a rotor is therefore 40 rps * 2' * (2 * pi {path traced by the rotor}) / 2 {for the midpoint of the rotor} = 251 feet per second = 172 miles per hour. A rotor yeeted at 172 miles per hour will go quite a ways on Mars (especially since it's on a slope--it could be lobbed at an angle, not merely flat) and there's a very, very expensive spacecraft nearby. (And it must be nearby--Ingenuity can't talk to Earth. You can't back off to a safe distance and try it.)
- bigbillheck 3y agoDesigned for five, lasted 72, not too shabby.
- subterrane 3y agoI dunno, feels like they overshot it. They should talk to the engineers that made my washing machine. That thing was designed to outlast the warranty and, I'll be damned, they nailed it.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y agoOnly so much genius to go around.
- rtkwe 3y agoExtraplanetary missions are almost always many times longer than initially designed because the initial mission is largely limited by the budget which includes the price of the people here on Earth and the time available on the Deep Space Network. Building a rover robust enough to last way longer than the basic mission is a blip in the budget when you include that and the launch costs so they keep being run until they're surpassed by another mission, they run out of some consumable (on Curiosity for example there's a limited number of times they can run some of the internal equipment), or they're out of new things to find to justify the cost of going on.
- dotnet00 3y agoWith the rovers its pretty much a given that they'll out last the initially stated 90 day mission. They're much more expensive and carefully crafted for the task. Ingenuity is special because it's commercial off-the-shelf parts put together on a low-ish budget. It (as well as various other aspects of Perseverance) has shown that Mars can be tolerable for off the shelf hardware, rather than needing bespoke million dollar projects for everything.
- rtkwe 3y ago
- nickthegreek 3y agoRIP little guy. This project was worth it for the marketing they got out it alone. I've seen so many stories about it since its launch. I hope it resonated with today's youth and gets them interested in space exploration.
- purpleblue 3y agoCan they just do one more #YOLO flight at a high speed and high altitude as possible and see what happens? Seems more useful and fun than just leaving it to rot.
- HPsquared 3y agoProbably don't want any flying debris hitting the rover.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoIt's nearly a kilometer from the rover, should be fine. But I agree that it's better to leave it, download the remaining images and data from memory, maybe leave the software running as an experiment in non-rad-hardened computers on the surface, and eventually put it in a museum, than risk it crashing in spectacular fashion.
- lorstic 3y agoThe tips of the rotors approach the speed of sound. Around Mach 0.95. I'm sure someone can do the math on the maximum debris field, but I think it'll be larger than you're thinking.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoI doubt the debris field would be 1km in size. Assume you throw a high-speed small piece of propeller tip debris at the optimal angle at 240 m/s or about 800 fps. I'm sure it goes farther in lower Martian gravity and atmosphere but a spinning lead air rifle pellet at that speed and the optimal high-arc trajectory could barely make it half that far on Earth. None of the ballistics tables have columns for Martian atmosphere or gravity. (Yet! I hope I live to see a day when we could use this information, but not quite as much as I hope that we never have to use this in anger.) But even in the worst case, you're scattering a 1.8 kilogram robot (more accurately, a few grams of the rotor blades) over an area of pi square kilometers. The chance that a large chunk hits Perseverance just wrong is negligible.
- PretzelPirate 3y agoThey should auction it off. For pickup only, of course. I'd like to own the first helicopter on Mars.
- madduci 3y agoI wonder if they will pick up the trash or we are just littering everywhere in space
- doubleorseven 3y agoI would first check the software license and if i have the "right to repair" on this beauty.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoIt's going to be on display at the Visitor Center when your grandkids visit.
- adastra22 3y agoYou joke, but Russia did that with their moon rover.
- mkl 3y agoIn 1993, to Richard Garriott, for just $68,000: https://www.space.com/8073-privately-owned-soviet-moon-rover-sparks-space-law-talks.html https://www.space.com/8073-privately-owned-soviet-moon-rover...
- varjag 3y agoGood luck getting Russia acknowledging the deal as still valid today.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoRichard Garriot aka Lord British who made the Ultima series of videogames?
- omgmajk 3y agoThree years and over 70 flights. That is pure wonder! RIP little guy, you did well.
- fredthedeadhead 3y agoAre images of the damage available to the public? "Imagery revealing damage to the rotor blade arrived several days later." https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/after-three-years-on-mars-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-mission-ends https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/after-three-years-on-mars-nasa...
- dfcab 3y agoThere is a picture of the helicopter that has arrows in your link, click next and you will see the tip of the blade in a shadow. :(
- Redoubts 3y agohttps://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26243-ingenuity-spots-the-shadow-of-its-damaged-rotor-blade https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26243-ingenuity-spots-the...
- fredthedeadhead 3y agoThanks, I missed that! It looks like it landed on quite an incline, almost 45 degrees.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIt takes a few hours to Photoshop over the bite-marks and claw-gouges.
- hall0ween 3y agolol nice
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- imglorp 3y agoEverything about the mission provided valuable data: especially that damaged blade. Failure modes are useful. Next, it might be useful to try flying anyway. If not, they still have running cameras, sensors and computer, until Perseverance moves out of range.
- Whatarethese 3y agoWasn't it only supposed to fly just a few time but it blew that number out of the water. Great job NASA engineers!
- Sindisil 3y agoFive flights was the original mission plan.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoRest in Peace little dude https://xkcd.com/695/ https://xkcd.com/695/
- synapsomorphy 3y agoI just interned at the NASA office (at Ames) that designed large chunks of and did a lot of flight planning / analysis for Ingenuity. It had some really awesome people behind it and its success inspired a number of new Mars rotorcraft missions (rotorcraft will be an integral part of Mars Sample Return). Flight is going to be a huge part of future solar system exploration efforts and Ingenuity paved the way. o7
- contact9879 3y agoIsn't Mars Sample Return pretty much dead at this point?
- rockemsockem 3y agoWhy do you say that?
- pvaldes 3y agoIt depends on sample location. After discovering patches of water ice, the planet is more interesting than ever.
- synapsomorphy 3y agoI contributed to the helicopter design for it so I'm biased but I think it'll happen eventually even if the funding isn't approved this administration/year/decade. The already-stashed samples will be up there basically forever, and we'll probably want samples from a few different areas anyways, so it makes sense to go grab them.
- ugh123 3y agoI hope the development of the MAV will bring us closer to building launch vehicles capable of getting humans off Mars. Seems like the MAV is preloaded with fuel and pretty small but should provide some good data for future missions. https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/#Ascent-Vehicle https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/#Ascent-Vehicle
- dcsommer 3y ago
- christiangenco 3y agoI'm pretty sure none of my terrestrial drones have lasted more than a few dozen flights—72 across the solar system is impressive engineering!
- LASR 3y agoFor some reason, this kind of news always makes me sad. Like emotionally. Probably because of this https://xkcd.com/695/ https://xkcd.com/695/ NASA has done an effective job at connecting with regular people. Goes to show, how even something as small as naming something differently makes a big shift in the mindset.
- zilti 3y agoThat xkcd gets me every time.
- Buttons840 3y agoI sometimes personify things too--impossible to throw away old stuffed animals. I just tell myself these objects fulfilled their purpose, and that makes them happy.
- Leszek 3y agoI've always preferred this alternative rewrite: https://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/spirit_rewrite_unknown_author.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/spirit_rewrite_unknown_author.png
- kaycebasques 3y agoThank you, that's much more aligned with the spirit of a rover that I imagine
- h2odragon 3y agoGreat run. They're gonna have trouble justifying buying the extended warranty next time.
- blisterpeanuts 3y agoFrom the article: The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield. I wonder if the rover couldn't proceed to the location of the helicopter and get some high res images for diagnostic purposes. I'm sure they considered that option so maybe the rover's schedule is just too busy to accommodate such a mission. Anyway, R.I.P. Ingenuity and kudos to Nasa for another excellent piece of tech that lasted on another planet for years longer than originally planned.
- laverya 3y agoAlso the rover is really, really slow - a few hundred meters on a good day.
- zokier 3y agoRover time and mission resources are definitely limited and a concern, but apparently the location of the copter is also really inconvenient to access. Its sitting down in a valley middle of big sand ripple field. So its not clear if the rover could reach there even if they wanted to. That being said, not all hope is lost. While closeups are unlikely, the rover is driving in that general direction so there is (very slight) possibility to catch the copter in some lucky drive-by pic from a distance.
- seatac76 3y agoSad to hear but kudos for an absolute feat of engineering.
- ragebol 3y agoSo, it still landed, upright no less, with a piece of the rotor blade missing? I'd guess that when a piece of rotor comes off during flight, the imbalance would make landing impossible. Very curious to what happened, but probably we'll never know exactly.
- tempestn 3y agoMy guess would be that the rotor struck the ground during landing.
- Kerb_ 3y agoIf I'm interpreting the picture correctly, it does look like there is a gouge on the ground in the pic showing the shadow
- somat 3y agoAlso, there are some very interesting shiny blue rocks in that photo. I assume scrapped by the rotor. I would be very interested in a xenogeology article on this.
- tempestn 3y agoMaybe those are pieces of rotor? I know the rotors look white in the other picture, but maybe the broken surface is different and/or they look bluish reflecting light in that picture.
- dtgriscom 3y agoLanding is easy. Landing without causing further damage, though...
- arthurcolle 3y agoHow did the prop tip get damaged like that? Did it crash into something?
- junon 3y agoMost likely. > Communication with Ingenuity was lost again at the end of the 72nd flight on January 18, 2024. JPL regained contact on January 20. Not an expert here but I assume the loss of contact was caused by some crash or something.
- prismic 3y agoThey mentioned during the media briefing that the terrain they were flying in were featureless, which is extremely challenging for it to determine where it's at, and thus it's possible that it misidentified some aspect of the terrain and caused this. Unfortunately because communication was lost when it landed, the flight data was lost, so we will never know for sure what happened.
- Dylan16807 3y agoIt doesn't save flight data until it receives confirmation of download?
- foobarbecue 3y agoDuring flight, high-rate flight data is written to volatile RAM, and 1HZ data is telemetered to Perseverance. The high-rate data is not written to disk until landing, because writing to disk is slow and CPU-intensive. There was a brownout during or just before landing, and sadly that meant the high-rate telemetry data was lost because it was never written to disk. And by "disk" I mean non-volatile flash memory.
- Dylan16807 3y agoOkay, so we do have a subset of the flight data. Thanks for the info.
- donquichotte 3y agoFor anyone interested in the structure of the software that ran Ingenuity (and some hardware design aspects, such as the use of commercial off-the-shelve parts), there is an awesome and critically underwatched video of Timothy Canham explaining everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQu9m4MG5Gc&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQu9m4MG5Gc&t=7s
- geor9e 3y agoI always thought it was crazy that NASA uses a FPGA/microcontroller/cell phone SOC setup, which makes total sense to me, but mundane industrial things like the traffic light at an intersection needs a giant cabinet with shelves of crazy seimens controllers, it feels like such overkill in comparison, you can see them on this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udpB-en9KKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udpB-en9KKM . The guy is always arguing with the commenters that its all needed for safety. I never could figure out why some company doesnt come up with a NASA-sized solution to control the worlds intersections instead.
- ballooney 3y agoInfact, NASA wouldn’t use that sort of SOC for anything critical like the rover itself. Ingenuity was always a marginal experiment with a correspondingly high appetite for risk and ability to accept budgetary compromises.
- ragnot 3y agoI'm curious what do they use then? Seems like using an FPGA for sensor gathering and some guidance loops with microcontroller logic control is sensible. I've run into scenarios where just the sensior gathering/IO can take up a significant portion of the time slice of the microcontroller.
- _joel 3y agoSure, it was a test platform, to prove that they can use a less RAD hardened design by using the more novel approach. I'd imagine future rovers will definitely use a similar approach.
- MicolashKyoka 3y agoamazing work by the team at nasa. we'll get there and repair it so it does fly again in a few years :')
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bredren 3y agoWas the singular focus on the Wright Brothers' contributions to flight and ingenuity a fair one? I had thought there was some shift in the Wright Brothers' attribution to flight in general. It seemed like better recognition of the contributions by Samuel Langley and Glenn Curtiss' to flight technology were along with acknowledgement of the WB's own efforts to boost their legacy might have checked a decision to keep pouring on the WB-were-the-ones narrative.
- vpribish 3y agoWhere did they talk about the Wrights? This on the wrong article?
- cybrox 3y agoIt's part of the video of Bill Nelsons speech that's embedded in the article.
- cybrox 3y agoIt was not about the contribution but about the moment. The Wright brothers achieved the first powered flight on earth and Ingenuity achieved the first powered flight on another planet. I think people are well aware that it's neither the Wright brothers nor ingenuity as a singular entity that did what ultimately concluded in that achievement but rather the scientific effort of humanity as a whole.
- bredren 3y agoI disagree, if anything, the Wright brothers’ documented first powered flight and desperate effort to control the technology and historical narrative have caused other contributors to continue to go unrecognized in important mainstream media like this. If it was the scientific effort of humanity as a whole, then it seems like the director would have simply compared it to the profound effort toward manned flight. After all, we have Langley Air Force Base and NASA’s own Langley Research Center.
- schiffern 3y agoIn other news, some reliability engineer at NASA somewhere is very happy to have a new data point. "Oh, so that's where....."
- AlbertCory 3y agoThe helicopter is one of the coolest things NASA's ever done. 72 flights. Wow. Great job, folks.
- anigbrowl 3y agoIt's pretty great that the point of failure is one of the prop blades vs the cheap-as-chips electronic components. Of course I'm sorry to see it out of commission, but istm they can keep using the cameras, both to gather some information about the weather and to see how long the various components & batteries keep working - at least until it's time to move the rover out of range. Since flight is no longer an option I wonder if the CPU and MCUs can be repurposed to some other sort of task like image analysis. All in all I think Ingenuity's mission history is a strong argument for experimentation over total advance planning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)#Opposition_to_the_helicopter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)#Opposit...
- mrandish 3y agoThat was an amazing run. Well done Genny!
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoGreatly exceeded expectations. This little heli has earned its place in space history.
- linsomniac 3y agoThat achievement is spectacular! Based on my experience flying drones, 72 flights is about 72 flights more than I can do without damaging the blades....
- happytiger 3y agoPoor little buddy broke a wing. Little thing was perhaps the coolest space project ever to my inner 12 year old. My whole family just lived the drama of this whole project. So cool. I don’t know about the rest of you but we’re going to pour one out for the little guy. And high compliments to the team that pulled this off. This was an astounding project.
- pengaru 3y agoSo how long before we send a swarm of 100s of these to image the entire planet up close and personal?