Mars Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance are talking again The long-lived Ingenuity helicopter has made contact with NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars after an unexpected communications blackout. Ingenuity just passed the milestone of a year of operations on the Red Planet, after being designed for five experimental test flights over 30 Martian days during 2021. Thus far, the …
Its most recent flight resulted in Ingenuity travelling approximately 1,371 feet 421.8m horizontally at a maximum altitude of around 33 feet 10.2m.
We don't want to encourage the brexiters. Way to go, tech team! Do you think it will fly? Maybe. Bloddy hell, it's been up a year! Have a beer (0.5l obviously). :-)
I was going to point out that NASA is American, and they did their Brexit (ie declaring independence from Britain) about 250 years ago, give or take a few.
So all this new-fangled metric stuff doesn't feature so much, at least in distance measurements.
There have been attempts by them (NASA) to swap, but it didn't go so well...
I think that's because YEXIT (Yank exit) occurred while Britain still had a squillion local variations of measures. Volumes in particular were all over the shop, with multiple definitions of hogshead and firkins and barrels and so on. So they inherited a subset of those, which then expanded geographically. Britain had a big push for standard measures at some point but I can't remember exactly when.
It was only the desire for more readable train timetables that led to standardizing _time_. Every town had its own (correct) time. Now nearly all towns have an incorrect but standard time. Except Oxford. Oxford's town clock still runs on Oxford time, not standard time. 2mins behind or something.
Its most recent flight resulted in Ingenuity travelling approximately 1,371 feet 421.8m 210.2 Osmans horizontally at a maximum altitude of around 33 feet 10.2m 5 Osmans.
If we must maintain standards, let us conform to ElReg ® standards.
In all seriousness, another case of beer for the boffins. But despite their ingenuity, I doubt that Ingenuity is long for that world. Winter is coming.
I'm pretty sure they did think of that, but initially the idea was to keep Ingenuity as far away from Perseverance as possible whilst still maintaining up/downlink capabilities. Imagine if your opportunistic "Hold my beer and watch this" technology demonstrator managed to go up ok but then crater in on your $quillions nuclear rover during it's first flight, thereby wrecking the entire mission.
... But still amazed by: designed for 5 flights, got 28 in the log book.
There's fewer and fewer refuges in which what one might call "proper engineering" is still done, but the space exploration programme is still one of them.
I know that the exploration of Mars has in recent times been "Agile" in the sense that one mission has lead to another better mission, but they're not making many mistakes.
I think an RTG for Ingenuity would weigh as much as Ingenuity itself does right now.
Maybe now they've proved they can fly out there, the next such craft could/would likely be designed around an RTG. But there could still be power/weight ratio issues since it takes more energy to fly than it does to trundle.
Of course. I wasn't sure how much the RTG weighs. Probably far too much to be feasible with current tech and designs, but perhaps now they've shown stuff can fly on Mars, it might drive an effort to significantly reduce the mass. Efforts that would be useful for trundlebots as well. Less RTG mass = more science mass.
From what I've seen, the smallest one is currently around 2kg, but the ones big enough to power Perseverance are more like 40kg.
Ingenuity also weighs about 2kg in total.
The problem is how much power RPGs can supply in one go. They're fine for keeping instruments alive or trundling gently across the landscape with a steady power requirement, but spinning propellers at high rpm in a thin atmosphere to get lift demands more.
Of course, future iterations of Ingenuity might contain more instruments and be much bigger, so would be heavier pro rata and require even more power to get lift.
It'll be interesting to see how it all develops.
I have a WiFi temperature sensor in the freezer, it's usually hovering at around -18 deg C. I really wasn't sure if this cheap consumer device would function at that temperature, anyway it's in a sealed food bag and has worked for about 18 months. Even more surprising is that the standard AA Eneloop type rechargeable batteries had been in there for a year before I warmed then up back to room temp and recharged them 'just in case'.
So why does Ingenuity's heater have to kick in at such a high temperature? Surely space-hardened hardware and batteries can work at much lower temperatures?
Safety margins. If your freezer thermometer stops working, you can easily replace it. Ingenuity they wanted to try out as much stuff as possible.
Now they have a decent amount of data about flight profiles etc, they can push the envelope a bit and see how cold she gets before failing (or not failing, as we all hope!)
Imagine if Perseverance could drive to place itself over Ingenuity and pick it up to store it inside a drone-bay for safe keeping and perhaps maintenance. As an RTG-powered rover, it is massive enough that such luxuries (i.e. weight & complexity additions) can be justified. Especially if it's part of the scientific mission.
Now that Ingenuity has proven what such devices are capable of on Mars, it may be that the next nuclear-powered rover will carry multiple of such (improved) drones onboard, which can then land and take-off as required for the mission.
Ingenuity is probably not long for this Universe at this point, but may herald a very exciting new chapter of Martian exploration.
"As an RTG-powered rover, it is massive enough that such luxuries (i.e. weight & complexity additions) can be justified."
Other consideration come in to play before getting this larger, heavier nuclear powered tank on to the Martian surface. Larger payload, more fuel, bigger parachutes, bigger, heavier more powerful "skycrane"also needing more fuel, etc.
Of course, all those points could be moot if Musk and Starship get there before NASA gets it's next Mars lander out of the planning stages :-)
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