NASA's 161-second helicopter tour of Martian terrain On Friday NASA released footage of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flying further and faster than ever before. The film recorded during Ingenuity's 25th flight on April 8 when it flew 704 meters at up to 5.5 meters per second. In the sped-up footage shown below, the vehicle climbs to 10 meters, heads southwest, accelerates to …
I think its just that to be *sure* something will survive 'x', the statistical bell curve of how long it will really last is by definition going to be pretty far to the right.
Example: design me a pane of glass that the average man can hit with a hammer 3 times and it not break....
How many hits do you think such a pane of glass would withstand? Closer to 5 or closer to 500?
Still impressive either way when you're only aiming for 3, well done NASA
Fuchsache - that's almost as fast as my firmly terrestrial (rural) broadband.
Can't get my head around them getting data from another freaking planet as fast as I get Netflix in a western country.
Icon - because my brain just did that.
RF is an amazingly effective medium for transmission when there is line of sight without hard obstructions.
The Ionosphere doesn't even trouble the signal too much at the frequencies involved.
Consider your own retina can receive the reflected sunlight from Mars without too much trouble if you point your eyes in the right direction. It's more effective with a telescope. So replace telescope with directional gain antenna, and you have your RF link with only noise to worry about.
The data rate is quite an achievement indeed.
But why is video quality so bad, then? A 137 € mobile phone records better video. Uplink data rate is not a limiting factor. Maybe they just didn't have a better radiation/shock/$ENVIRONMENTAL_HOSTILITY-hardened image sensor available at the time of build. This is a genuine question, not to put NASA down.
But why is video quality so bad, then?
Low wattage camera, processor, and communications systems, and limited bandwidth.
From this link: "The end-of-life battery power is estimated at 35.75 Wh. Of this,10.73 Wh is reserved for improved battery life and emergencies, 21 Wh is reserved for night time heater use. This leaves 10 Wh for flight per day, assuming flight is done to still allow some charge."
You have to fit any camera work into that budget.
Video is also competing for bandwidth from the 17 cameras on Perseverance, plus the science payloads.
"The navigation camera turns off when the rotorcraft is within a meter of landing to keep dust off its navigation system."
"The navigation camera turns off when the Area 51 engineer catches the Menkind Junior 4k Drone after the LiPo gives up two minutes into flight"
FTFY
I know the OP is telling the truth, I've seen Capricorn One too.
"Perseverance can achieve transmission rates of up to 2Mb/s to its overhead orbiters, which then relay that data back to Earth at between 500Kb/s to around 3Mb/s, depending on the relative position between Mars and Earth."
Broadband not provided by BT then - this would buffer on my home BT line.....
What, you never walk or run anywhere?
(Yes, I agree that km/h is a more helpful description for faster speeds, but on the scale of the flight we are talking about here, m/s is not entirely inappropriate for use in a report for the general public.)
Perhaps solar panels are not the correct power source for Mars on longer running missions? Ignoring weight, would a smaller nuclear core with a robot power hookup work better for the helicopter or perhaps multiple helicopters to provide redundancy of loss? Fly one while the other recharges, etc?
The MMRTG used by Curiosity and Perseverance generates 110 watts of electricity (at mission start) from a 45-kilogram assembly. While you said, "ignoring weight," 45kg is a significant chunk of a Mars mission's payload and well outside the boundaries of a 1.8-kilogram drone like Ingenuity, which also needs up to 350 watts.
If I understood correctly that you were suggesting putting the RTG elsewhere (e.g., a ground-based carrier like the Perseverance rover), there are a couple of issues depending on how you arrange things:
1. If you want the carrier to also do some science and trundle about then you've got hot competition for those 110 watts. Perseverance and Curiosity are golf cart-sized vehicles that can demand up to 900 watts during their peak activities.
2. If you diminish the carrier's science role to support the flying drones then you're sharply limiting the scientific payload the mission. Perseverance carries 59kg of scientific gear, which is not something you're going to fit on modestly up-sized versions of Ingenuity.
There's the additional issue that if you repeatedly land the flying drone(s) near or on the carrier then you need to convince engineers that it won't damage the carrier during a bad landing. A 350-watt motor spinning counter-rotating propellers will do a good job blending exterior equipment on a rover.
That said, there's probably room for compromise in power budgets and activities. Now that Ingenuity has proven that a helicopter mini-drone can work on Mars, you can bet something like it will be tried again, but bigger and with some real scientific payload. That might call for a power sharing arrangement between rovers and aerial drones.
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