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Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

nasa.gov

171–180 of 210 posts

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. If the primary point was to put a man on the moon, the cost of bringing things back is basically free. If on the other hand the primary mission was bringing back as many rocks as possible, then yes, the return would be very expensive.

It's interesting to think about: The stated mission for the Space Race has often been "put a man in orbit", "put a man on the Moon", "put staff in the space station for X period". But implicit in all of those mission designs has been the goal of returning the crew alive and in one piece. The record is rather favorable in that regard, and it's always a tragedy when we lose someone. So that's one of the reasons a crewe…

Well, it's more of a pyramid scheme. You can send more people to mars than you can send back to earth. So nothing prevents Elon Musk from sending "100" people to mars and 10 person back. Then the people who want to return can lie about how awesome it is on mars and convince more of them to come to secure their own return trip.

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I thought I was terminally online but I've never seen this before.

Oh, God, these comments may be the trigger to my mid-life crisis.

If it's any consolation, it's been around since the 90s

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#173
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the rover itself was in possesion of russia and is now in posession of Garriot. That is undisputed. What is rightfully disputed, is whether he also owns the land under the rover. He would like to, but not possible with current laws.

> What is rightfully disputed, is whether he also owns the land under the rover. He would like to, but not possible with current laws. Actually, contrary to the opinion of Ms. Gabrynowicz, current case law and government/agency positions represented by the Artemis Accords reflect Mr. Garriot's claim. It may have been an untested hypothetical at the time, but in the current political climate it is finding support by a…

"In fact they go even further in asserting exclusions zones much larger than just the regolith undermining a lander or rover."

I really hope this won't become reality in the mind of confrontation and being first to claim land, because this will mean, spamming the moon surface with cheap "scientific" equipment to claim lots of land. I mean, what is the bar here for lander? Is it enough to have a flag with it? Then you can have a flag inside a steel cannon ball and shoot many of them across the lunar landscape.

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fun anecdote this is one of the very few things that was completely faked in "The Martian" - book and movie alike, which is otherwise a hard sci-fi book. I think it's quite telling when your instigator for a disaster scenario on Mars has to be faked! Well at least intentionally faked. It turns out Martian regolith/soil is also much more moist than expected so getting water will be relatively easy, but at the tim…

> The Martian The thin atmosphere bit is acknowledged by the author, you can watch his talk here around 32:35: I just want to be as accurate as I possibly could. There are a few places that are inaccurate. The biggest place that's inaccurate is right at the beginning. Don't tell anybody, but if you're in a dust storm on Mars, you're not even going to feel it. Mars' atmosphere is less than 1% of Earth's. So a 150 kilo…

Well yeah, he needed some sort of catastrophic event to set the rest of the story in motion, and a huge dust storm which forces an evacuation and then separates Mark Watney from the rest of the crew was just the thing, so he added it although he was fully aware that storms don't work that way on Mars...

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#175
post #127

For anyone interested in the structure of the software that ran Ingenuity (and some hardware design aspects, such as the use of commercial off-the-shelve parts), there is an awesome and critically underwatched video of Timothy Canham explaining everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQu9m4MG5Gc&t=7s

I always thought it was crazy that NASA uses a FPGA/microcontroller/cell phone SOC setup, which makes total sense to me, but mundane industrial things like the traffic light at an intersection needs a giant cabinet with shelves of crazy seimens controllers, it feels like such overkill in comparison, you can see them on this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udpB-en9KKM . The guy is always arguing with the comme…

Infact, NASA wouldn’t use that sort of SOC for anything critical like the rover itself. Ingenuity was always a marginal experiment with a correspondingly high appetite for risk and ability to accept budgetary compromises.

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#176
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke, but Russia did that with their moon rover.

In 1993, to Richard Garriott, for just $68,000: https://www.space.com/8073-privately-owned-soviet-moon-rover...

Good luck getting Russia acknowledging the deal as still valid today.

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#177
post #22

For some reason, this kind of news always makes me sad. Like emotionally. Probably because of this https://xkcd.com/695/ NASA has done an effective job at connecting with regular people. Goes to show, how even something as small as naming something differently makes a big shift in the mindset.

That xkcd gets me every time.

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean that place that smells of burnt metal and is full of hard radiation? Surface of Mars is definitely more hospitable.

> Overall, astronauts often compare the smell of space to "hot metal, burnt meat, burnt cakes, spent gunpowder and welding of metal," according to Steve Pearce, a biochemist and CEO of Omega Ingredients, who combed through astronaut interviews to help him craft a NASA-commissioned scent: https://www.livescience.com/space/what-does-space-smell-like Guess I'm one of today's 10,000.

Wouldn't it be the smell of space suits and space stations, rather than space itself? I don't think astronauts have tried to breath the few particles in the vacuum.

Re: Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

#179

I just interned at the NASA office (at Ames) that designed large chunks of and did a lot of flight planning / analysis for Ingenuity. It had some really awesome people behind it and its success inspired a number of new Mars rotorcraft missions (rotorcraft will be an integral part of Mars Sample Return). Flight is going to be a huge part of future solar system exploration efforts and Ingenuity paved the way. o7

Isn't Mars Sample Return pretty much dead at this point?

It depends on sample location. After discovering patches of water ice, the planet is more interesting than ever.
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