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NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

phys.org

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Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#131

Post by wolverine876 »

iknowstuff wrote: post #47
Kye wrote: post #20

Didn't this use mostly off the shelf parts? If so, I wonder how this will impact costs on future missions. If they can do more with consumer hardware, they can save budget to apply toward more science.

The original Elon Musk biography describes how a legacy aerospace engineer joined spacex and was tasked with a part: > He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’”

I'm sure Musk's biography says lots of things. Do you still take it a face value?

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#132

Post by Kon-Peki »

wolverine876 wrote: post #130
Kon-Peki wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It got there by challenging conventional wisdom, she adds. Most launchpad air conditioning systems, for instance, cost nearly half a million dollars, but SpaceX execs wondered why it cost so much more to cool an area the size of a conference room than the $75,000 it cost to cool their entire headquarters and manufacturing plant. The company brought the cost down to about $35,000, says Shotwell. https://www.northwes…

These are self-reported stories by one of the most extreme self-promoters in business. Let's not take it too seriously.

I wouldn’t take them seriously, except that SpaceX has a full decade of very reliable launch services at a fraction of the cost. You might ask how they did that, and SpaceX says “here are some examples”. It’s not just reusing rockets.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#133

Post by liamwire »

pimlottc wrote: post #31
jvm___ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Earth or Mars?

I don’t think you’re supposed to hold your breathe when lifting…

Jokes aside, you absolutely are. Bracing properly is a critical skill in both olympic weightlifting and traditional strength training.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#134

Post by jacquesm »

wolverine876 wrote: post #128
jacquesm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But usually it is a handful of really large contributors and more smaller ones. And that's fine, but I'm not aware of a project where the contribution graph is more or less flat. And more often than not those large contributors are paid by large companies to contribute.

I wonder which largish FOSS project has the flattest contribution graph?

That's a great question. Whichever project it turns out to be their governance and leadership will be well worth studying.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#135

Post by baq »

wolverine876 wrote: post #130
Kon-Peki wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It got there by challenging conventional wisdom, she adds. Most launchpad air conditioning systems, for instance, cost nearly half a million dollars, but SpaceX execs wondered why it cost so much more to cool an area the size of a conference room than the $75,000 it cost to cool their entire headquarters and manufacturing plant. The company brought the cost down to about $35,000, says Shotwell. https://www.northwes…

These are self-reported stories by one of the most extreme self-promoters in business. Let's not take it too seriously.

If there’s any company you should pay attention to when they report successful cost cutting, it's spacex. You can hate or love Musk but Gwynne Shotwell is the real deal there. Not sure how she keeps Elon from blowing the whole business up but somehow she does and quite successfully at that.

If she says you can keep cool whatever needs cooling for 10% of the Boeing price, you’d better believe it.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#136

Post by iknowstuff »

wolverine876 wrote: post #131
iknowstuff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Elon Musk biography describes how a legacy aerospace engineer joined spacex and was tasked with a part: > He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’”

I'm sure Musk's biography says lots of things. Do you still take it a face value?

I see the results of spacex’s work. Are you blind?

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#137

Post by M95D »

TheCoreh wrote: post #126
inamberclad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact - the cameras that captures Perseverance's landing are also Linux based and vim is installed - at least on the later model that I worked with.

Using it with a 20 minute delay between keystrokes and their results must be interesting

I'm sure they didn't connect to it via the internet to send keystrokes.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#138

Post by CuriousCosmic »

foobar1962 wrote: post #114
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They planned for three 90 second flights prior to launch. After those worked they transitioned over to longer "operations demo" flights and those were extended tentatively out to 12 flights. After the 21st flight they just stopped manually allocating labor and funding to the project for a set number of flights and instead gave them a running budget for indefinite continued operations. So while "strictly speaking" the…

It sounds as though mission life has as much to do with funding for ground staff (not something I ever considered) at least as much as it has to do with the life expectancy of deployed hardware.

Yep. For example, Spirit and Opportunity were part of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. 2/3 of that mission's total cost was the development, manufacture, and launch of the rovers themselves. Which more or less "per unit" works to 1/3 of the total mission cost per rover. The other third of that mission cost was staffing for the (15 year) ongoing mission from when it passed the initial mission parameters to when opportunity finally was deemed dead in 2018.

https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-the-mars-expl...

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#139

Post by Keysh »

jvanderbot wrote: post #22
simion314 wrote: post #2

We will use more helicopters instead of rovers for new missions ? Or larger crafts would be much harder or riskier to use ? Or maybe have a helicopter that can move the rover with the equipment to different locations.

Surfacing a comment: Here's a paper that describes what the next gen could/should be. The lead author is the head of Mars heli, IIRC. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9843501 In short, future designs target ~30kg heli, 5kg payloads. Other designs by collaborators are closer to 20kg. It's probably possible to transport a few of these on the existing lander technology, which would be awesome. The scholar.g…

Non-paywalled article about the concept, including renderings of the hexacopter design:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-next-mars-helicopter

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