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The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

universetoday.com

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Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#121

Post by m4rtink »

alpaca128 wrote: post #100
endymi0n wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so cool, I didn‘t know about these yet and I‘d call myself a space buff... Speaking of flight and picking the nits here — looks like Wikipedia also isn‘t completely correct here: > It is planned to make the first powered flight on any planet beyond Earth ...arguably the first _powered_ flights were done by the sky cranes of Opportunity and Perseverance

> ...arguably the first _powered_ flights were done by the sky cranes of Opportunity and Perseverance Not the Apollo 11 lunar module? In contrast to the sky cranes it actually lifted off again.

On the Moon the first controlled powered flights were likely the Surveyor and Luna probes - they had braking and landing thrusters controlled by onboard avionics.

Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#122

Post by m4rtink »

alpaca128 wrote: post #100
endymi0n wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so cool, I didn‘t know about these yet and I‘d call myself a space buff... Speaking of flight and picking the nits here — looks like Wikipedia also isn‘t completely correct here: > It is planned to make the first powered flight on any planet beyond Earth ...arguably the first _powered_ flights were done by the sky cranes of Opportunity and Perseverance

> ...arguably the first _powered_ flights were done by the sky cranes of Opportunity and Perseverance Not the Apollo 11 lunar module? In contrast to the sky cranes it actually lifted off again.

On Mars the Viking probes used rockets for controlled landing, so that likely also counts. Pathfinder just had one shot braking rockets.

Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#123

Post by tus89 »

julienchastang wrote: post #93

Fun fact: This is not the first time a space program has flown on another planet. The Soviets launched weather balloons on Venus during the Venera missions [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon

If we understand "flight" as being the use of a wing to generate lift in an atmosphere, then I think we can safely say this is the first time we have flown on another planet. I assume this little helicopter actually has rotary wings rather than fans.

Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#124

Post by tachyonbeam »

TedShiller wrote: post #119
julienchastang wrote: post #93

Fun fact: This is not the first time a space program has flown on another planet. The Soviets launched weather balloons on Venus during the Venera missions [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon

A balloon is barely an aircraft

A solar drone that takes hours to charge and flies only a minute at a time is barely an aircraft too. Don't get me wrong, it's a very cool tech demo and I can't wait to see the video, but IMO if your goal is to take pressure/composition measurements in the atmosphere at a variety of altitudes, a weather balloon is the right tool for the job.

Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#125

Post by syoc »

emkoemko wrote: post #108
mushufasa wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the fascinating things about space silicon is that NASA spends many years hardening specific processors to withstand the types of shocks and electromagnetic interference from space travel. These intensive processes mean that the equipment they can use is always 10-20 years behind the modern equivalents.

and yet they are fine with using a snapdragon arm processor on the helicopter?

> Ingenuity runs Linux (for the first time on Mars) and uses the open-source F' software framework on a 2.26 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor. Radiation hardened processors aren’t fast enough for the real-time vision requirements of the experiment—but as an unprotected COTS processor, it will fail periodically due to radiation-induced bit flips, possibly as much as every few minutes. NASA’s solution is to use a radiation-tolerant FPGA ProASIC3 to keep an eye on the CPU (paper) and software that attempts to double-check operations as much as possible. “[I]f any difference is detected they simply reboot. Ingenuity will start to fall out of the sky, but it can go through a full reboot and come back online in a few hundred milliseconds to continue flying.”

Source: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2021-02-24-Issue-105/#ingen...

Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#126

Post by Robotbeat »

eecc wrote: post #91
Robotbeat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smaller transistors also have a smaller cross-section so for the same number of transistors this somewhat cancels out.

But then you have to build for redundancy rather than just performance (say, sacrifice some floor-plan to error correction, recovery, circuit duplication, etc...)

Still a game of probability either way.

Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#127

Post by contravariant »

tus89 wrote: post #123
julienchastang wrote: post #93

Fun fact: This is not the first time a space program has flown on another planet. The Soviets launched weather balloons on Venus during the Venera missions [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon

If we understand "flight" as being the use of a wing to generate lift in an atmosphere, then I think we can safely say this is the first time we have flown on another planet. I assume this little helicopter actually has rotary wings rather than fans.

If we're splitting hairs then the lack of control seems like a better criterion to distinguish the two. If you ask me there's no reason a zeppelin would be inherently less 'flighty' than a helicopter.

Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#128

Post by rhino369 »

tus89 wrote: post #123
julienchastang wrote: post #93

Fun fact: This is not the first time a space program has flown on another planet. The Soviets launched weather balloons on Venus during the Venera missions [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon

If we understand "flight" as being the use of a wing to generate lift in an atmosphere, then I think we can safely say this is the first time we have flown on another planet. I assume this little helicopter actually has rotary wings rather than fans.

The common understanding of flight definitely doesn't include lighter than air (well atmosphere in this case) vehicles.

The first flight was in 1903, not 300 BC China when they used sky lanterns.

Re: The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly

#129

Post by contravariant »

dmurray wrote: post #102
madaxe_again wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between the two. 30 µSv per hour on the surface of Mars on average compared to 60 µSv on the Moon - compared to 5 µSv on a jet. Not friendly, but not too awful.

Or 0.5 per hour on Earth at sea level. That's only 2 orders of magnitude difference. Given that we don't expect radiation damage to be a major source of failures in Earthbound consumer or commercial electronics, it's a bit surprising it's such a big deal in space.

Well 2 orders of magnitude can turn a problem that occurs once a decade into a problem that occurs once a month so it's not too surprising that the problem is a bigger deal in space.
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