91–100 of 128 posts
You know helicopters in Mars is totally Phillip K Dick material. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_Time-Slip
A little more recent: https://youtu.be/oJGJEepIOt0?t=38 It's from Red Planet (2000): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199753/
From the series Mars (2006) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4939064/.
Does this make any sense? Isn't Mars' atmosphere much thinner than Earth's? Wouldn't that count against using rotary wing crafts?
Why does the BBC use "Nasa" instead of "NASA"?
>Where you would normally say the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec). http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201307021...
(Personally, I find it irritating and more annoying to read, both in prose and in code.)
So why not a blimp? I did not see any mention why they did not consider this though they did mention the Soviets using balloons on Venus. Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?
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Not having read the article, I am sure that they already did. Nothing gets sent beyond Earth's orbit without having gone through as much testing as is humanly possible on Earth. The cost of failure on Earth is several orders of magnitude less expensive than the cost of failure elsewhere. I would guess that sending a test helicopter along with another rover would be to do a feasibility test for larger flight-based pro…
They might not have, because it might just fall out of the sky. It's built to overcome Mars' gravity, not Earth's. However I agree with you, they will be testing it extensively in as close to Martian conditions as they can achieve.
A video has them flying that thing inside a pressure chamber without payload, so at least in this configuration it has enough power to overcome Earth's gravity. Probably wouldn't lift off on Earth with the payload, though.
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My guess is a normal quadcopter doesn't have a big enough thrust to weight ratio in Mars' atmosphere.
Can someone check my math/physics? The atmosphere on Mars is about 1.7% as dense as on Earth, meaning that a propeller on Earth will generate 58.8x more thrust than on Mars. An aircraft on Earth will weigh 2.6x of its Mars weight. Drones probably need a thrust to weight ratio of at least 1.5 to be reasonably maneuverable. A drone that has a 1.5 thrust to weight ratio on Mars would have a thrust to weight ratio of 1.5…
If this is the sort of experiment that is getting space on a rocket then I kind of wonder if NASA is out of ideas. In other news, Hepatitis C is making a big comeback here in Denver. It's the sort of disease we used to laugh about being a "third world" problem back in the day. We don't use the term "third world" anymore, but we are becoming one nonetheless. I can't stop thinking about what archaeologists will think a…
No, it's just your imagination that's limited. This is a good idea to test on Mars. Want crazier stuff? Google Venus blimps, or go and find papers about flying supersonic aircraft on Mars.
> I can't stop thinking about what archaeologists will think about us in a thousand years, they will struggle so much to even come up with plausible theories, much less agree on them.
I guess you're implying we should be spending that money on Hepatitis C, to which I'll answer "no, we shouldn't", as money spent on space is pretty useful there on the margin, so you should look for sources of money elsewhere, where there's just too much of it. And if anything, archaeologists will think we've been dumb to put such absurd amounts of wealth to stupid zero sum games and entertainment, instead medical research, space exploration, and basic sciences. But that's just my guess :).
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"The helicopter uses counter-rotating coaxial rotors about 1.1 m in diameter..." Not to be little it but, in short, a drone. I presume the rocket scientists are jealous ;)
That's what I thought too. But they've been designing this for years; so it might have started before drones got as popular as they are. I mean, drones are just a new name for hobby aircraft. People typically associate drones with quad-copters, but people were flying tiny helicopters next to their small replica remote aircraft for decades. I realize the FAA has official designations for what is a drone (and a lot of…
With the minor notation that hobby aircraft are permitted in some national parks, while drones are prohibited in all. The Parks Service operates a number of model aircraft airports in some national parks.
(I'm not moaning about the perceived inequity with the "drones;" just pointing out a curiosity. I've hated drones ever since they started ruining my ability to peacefully enjoy nature.)
>it's a word that's really come about because the field is now more accessible/affordable
I think it's a word that comes about because the marketers know that douchebags will respond to pretending that they're part of some secret military high-tech spy ops program, and not flying a Chinese plastic quadcopter. "Model aircraft" is for nerds. "Drone" is for monster truck owners and wannabes.
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They are usually called rovers, unless they actually fly. I cannot name any single atmospheric flight on another planet, only controlled plunges.
The Vega-1 and Vega-2 balloons operated for more than 46 hours in the atmosphere of Venus as part of the Soviet Venera programme [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program