NASA’s getting really good at this flying a helicopter on Mars thing NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter has flown flying faster and further than ever before - even when it was on Earth - and we even have video of Sunday's 80-second flight because the Perseverance Rover’s Mastcam-Z had its eye on the drone's third flight. The video showed the helicopter lift vertically to an altitude of five …
We now have the ability to make aerial surveys. NASA can send the drone to scout out a region, take a few snaps and report the data, letting boffins determine whether or not it would be interesting to send the trundlebot over there.
That's going to make for more efficient exploring.
Hats off to the boffins !
I suppose being mainly CO2 means the air is heavier than on earth, but at 1% density, how big would a balloon have to be? Not to mention the heavy tank of He required to fill it.
I wonder if a flight deck on top of a future rover with charging pads where the legs touch down, or wireless charging, might be better and more efficient than having the extra mass of solar panels on the drone for self charging in the drone might be better.
"I suppose being mainly CO2 means the air is heavier than on earth, but at 1% density, how big would a balloon have to be? Not to mention the heavy tank of He required to fill it."
I guess the composition of the air is largely irrelevant. If the mars air is 1% the density of earth's, then I presume to get the same lift as a balloon on earth it would need to be 100x the volume, all other things being equal. So that's about 3.2x bigger in terms of height.
Not as much as I'd have expected.
CO2 has a molecular mass of about 44; He, 4; O2, 32. So the volume would increase by (44-4)/(44-32) = 40/12=3.33-fold. Cube root of that is about 1.5, i.e., the balloon has to be about 50% bigger in all directions.
Though actually, we'd probably be using hydrogen, not helium. (This is Mars. It won't burn.) Hydrogen molecules leak less than helium does. There is a very slight advantage due to a lower molecular mass of 2.
Still... compressed tanks of gases are heavy. If they leak, you can't generate more. Silly as it sounded at first, I now actually wonder if you might do well to generate O2 on Mars and use that to lift your balloon/dirigible. Yes, the balloon has to be 50% larger, but not having to deal with hydrogen or helium would be a Big Deal.
And, of course, technology to extract oxygen from the atmosphere of Mars might eventually be of biological utility.
As to volume needed : on Earth, a cubic meter lifts about a kilogram. On Mars, the atmospheric density is (I think) about 1% of that, so you'd be talking about needing a hundred cubic meters to support one kilogram, or about 333 m^2 if you're using O2. Which would have to include the mass of the balloon, too. I don't know enough about balloons to say if that's stupid to hope for.
Well, you can actually make a lead balloon that properly floats :)
A hot air balloon is about 2,000m^3 and weighs around O(100kg) (ballpark numbers), so making one that would work is probably fine. Getting it there and deploying it might be another problem.
Equally, what should they do with the balloon during high winds (even if at 1% density)? Do you need to be able to reliably and repeatably deflate & reinflate it? Will it accumulate dust blown onto it (adding weight)?
"Silly as it sounded at first, I now actually wonder if you might do well to generate O2 on Mars and use that to lift your balloon/dirigible"
Wow! My implied "left as an exercise for the reader" went a long way with you. Thanks for that, very informative. I'd guess something like a weather balloon, which can be mind bogglingly large based on a laymans (my!!) expectations while being of exceptional;y low mass might actually be doable if the oxygen generator idea can be reasonably scaled up. Maybe there's a use for Googles "Project Loon" on Mars? :-)
> "I wonder if a flight deck on top of a future rover"...
I doubt they'd appreciate the risk involved of the copter potentially missing the target by a few centimetres and whacking the rotors against whatever instrumentation they have up there. Or the sandblasting effect of the downwash.
A towable landing platform might fare better, but I doubt that would be any lighter than the copter being self sufficient. Plus, as others have noted, being able to land and recharge will allow longer expeditions.
The only useful pizza delivery system is pair of hands. We have a local chap who drives his wood fired oven around to various places (including my local pub/brewery) and I am now of the opinion that pizza is indeed a food and not something that resembles the box it came in. And the new wild garlic pesto is pretty dam cool too!
>The only useful pizza delivery system is pair of hands
The only useful pizza delivery system is the Deliverator.
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. .... The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs.
Re: "They demonstrated the ability for the helicopter to fly on Mars, a challenge in and of itself as Mars' atmosphere lacks the density that creates lift."
Au contraire, I think they demonstrated that, even with the thin atmosphere (less than 1% the density of Earth's), it can create enough lift to fly on Mars
And here they are. A person whose life is so empty that they spend their useless hours and days searching for articles about great human achievements so they can write depressing, stupid comments in a futile attempt to make everyone else's life into the grey meaningless waste that is all they have ever known.
It must be horrible being you: I wish I felt sorry for you, but I don't.
'You must have the full set of elbow reinforcement on your jumper.' – ZanzibarRastapopulous, 2021
I see, it was a complement to a geologist. Because that kind of casual stereotyping is, after all, how you complement people, isn't it? The geologist I know would be so flattered ... oh, no, she wouldn't, at all: she'd chew your head off. Of course, after your endlessly-repeated 'it's just pictures of rocks' comments, we all know exactly what your opinion of geologists – people who, you know, are a bit interested in rocks – must be, right? So, gosh.
But actually I'm kind of impressed. What you're doing is as if I searched out articles on, I don't know, Java, and made a near-identical stupid little comment about how Java was the most boring thing in the world in each one. And then obsessively watched for replies to my comment. We used to get usenet trolls who did that (in fact, entertainingly, when I looked relatively recently at a newsgroup I used to read, it had been completely destroyed by the troll: everyone actually interested in the topic of the newsgroup had long left, and the troll was left, posting followups to articles more than a decade old and sometimes to themselves I think). I don't know what it says about your state of mind, but what you're doing is kind of impressive in a very sad way.
According to el Reg's greatest rival (New Scientist), the mission for Ingenuity has been extended for a month:
"The mission was planned to include only five flights before the Perseverance rover drove away and began its own primary missions of searching for signs of ancient life and collecting samples to be returned to Earth. However, NASA officials announced on 30 April that Ingenuity will travel alongside Perseverance, capturing aerial images that could help the rover scout potential routes and scientifically interesting areas nearby.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2276387-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-has-made-its-fourth-and-furthest-flight/#ixzz6tbnogVSS"
Excellent news that a space drone thingy made partly with commercial-off-the-shelf parts is lasting long enough for a mission extension.
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