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

nasa.gov

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

#191

Post by foobarbecue »

RugnirViking wrote: post #181

I don't know a lot about these missions. Does the rover have a sample gathering arm? would it be possible for the helicopter to be picked up and set onto something? or carried around? seems like it would be useful to have the backup connection route to the rover like when they used the helicopter to troubleshoot the rover a while back. Or alternatively even as a backup sensor suite for the rover. Plus the imagery of…

I like your creative thinking. Perseverance does have an arm with a drill, cameras, dust puffer, rock grinder, and spectrometers at the end.

However, Ingenuity is deep in a dune field which Perseverance can't drive into. The rover is too heavy to safely drive in deep sand -- it would get stuck.

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

#192

Post by foobarbecue »

nexawave-ai wrote: post #168

Maybe sometime in the future NASA will deploy a service or repair pit stop station for all their crafts on Mars. Imagine that, if a craft is damaged another automaton is deployed to retrieve the damaged craft where it is transported to the pit stop to be fixed or for routine maintenance. This will improve service life and only the service station would need manual intervention ie. Restocking for parts. So you would h…

I highly recommend the book A City on Mars, which explores these topics in a humorous, but well-researched, light.

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

#193

Post by foobarbecue »

TheCoreh wrote: post #163

I wonder why they only sent one? Why couldn't they send 3-5 identical helicopters so they still had a few more to spare? (The hover weights ~1000kg, the helicopter ~1kg)

Ingenuity was designed to fit under the rover, and occupied the available volume pretty completely. Check out the video of how it was deployed. Even if a multiple deployment system could be designed and the budget was available, there would probably need to be changes to the rover (which is based on Curiosity's design), and these things tend to make cost and complexity balloon. But, redundancy would be nice -- Mars Sample Return helicopter proposes a pair of helicopters.

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

#194

Post by timschmidt »

alfiopuglisi wrote: post #178
BuildTheRobots wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The smell is apparent when one doffs their suit after a spacewalk.

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

#195

Post by adastra22 »

lukan wrote: post #173
adastra22 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And then we’d have a functioning property market with resellable claims suitable for building a speculative futures market over accessible near-surface resources and other land rights, sufficient to bootstrap a cis-lunar economy without government subsidies?

GREAT, mission accomplished!

IMHO Richard Garriot should go a step further and sell his rover for scrap. Use that to bootstrap a commodities market.

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

#196

Post by rtkwe »

dotnet00 wrote: post #72
rtkwe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraplanetary missions are almost always many times longer than initially designed because the initial mission is largely limited by the budget which includes the price of the people here on Earth and the time available on the Deep Space Network. Building a rover robust enough to last way longer than the basic mission is a blip in the budget when you include that and the launch costs so they keep being run until the…

With the rovers its pretty much a given that they'll out last the initially stated 90 day mission. They're much more expensive and carefully crafted for the task. Ingenuity is special because it's commercial off-the-shelf parts put together on a low-ish budget. It (as well as various other aspects of Perseverance) has shown that Mars can be tolerable for off the shelf hardware, rather than needing bespoke million dol…

Generally they're either run until there's not much science left to do so funding dries up or there's some catastrophic failure of the rover itself. I'm not sure how much COTS you can actually do for future missions for flying rovers. A demonstrator is easier because it doesn't need the specialized scientific equipment that comes with doing science beyond looking at something from ground level.

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

#197

Post by imglorp »

ragebol wrote: post #45
imglorp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about the mission provided valuable data: especially that damaged blade. Failure modes are useful. Next, it might be useful to try flying anyway. If not, they still have running cameras, sensors and computer, until Perseverance moves out of range.

The rotors will be unbalanced (even if the other side also broke off, chances of the same amount breaking of are as remote as the thing itself), so it will vibrate and probably tip over if it spins too hard

Sure, but that will be more data than guessing and not trying.

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

#198

Post by danielvf »

omoikane wrote: post #164
somenameforme wrote: post #150

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…

I don't know anything about mars, but I've messed with windmill math. This really doesn't make sense to me.

A 150 mph wind in 1% atmosphere should be a way stronger a 1 mph wind on earth?

You know the old formula,

force = mass * velocity * velocity

But with wind and water the more velocity, the more mass you get hit with in the same amount of time, so we get to multiply by velocity again.

wind force = mass * velocity * velocity * velocity

(This formula is why people die in fast moving water.)

So a Mars 150mph wind (0.01 * 150 * 150 * 150) would have 34,000 times more force than a 1mph wind on earth. Which works out to around a 32 mph earth wind.

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

#199

Post by LeifCarrotson »

lorstic wrote: post #43
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nearly a kilometer from the rover, should be fine. But I agree that it's better to leave it, download the remaining images and data from memory, maybe leave the software running as an experiment in non-rad-hardened computers on the surface, and eventually put it in a museum, than risk it crashing in spectacular fashion.

The tips of the rotors approach the speed of sound. Around Mach 0.95. I'm sure someone can do the math on the maximum debris field, but I think it'll be larger than you're thinking.

I doubt the debris field would be 1km in size. Assume you throw a high-speed small piece of propeller tip debris at the optimal angle at 240 m/s or about 800 fps. I'm sure it goes farther in lower Martian gravity and atmosphere but a spinning lead air rifle pellet at that speed and the optimal high-arc trajectory could barely make it half that far on Earth. None of the ballistics tables have columns for Martian atmosphere or gravity. (Yet! I hope I live to see a day when we could use this information, but not quite as much as I hope that we never have to use this in anger.)

But even in the worst case, you're scattering a 1.8 kilogram robot (more accurately, a few grams of the rotor blades) over an area of pi square kilometers. The chance that a large chunk hits Perseverance just wrong is negligible.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

danielvf wrote: post #198
omoikane wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't know anything about mars, but I've messed with windmill math. This really doesn't make sense to me. A 150 mph wind in 1% atmosphere should be a way stronger a 1 mph wind on earth? You know the old formula, force = mass * velocity * velocity But with wind and water the more velocity, the more mass you get hit with in the same amount of time, so we get to multiply by velocity again. wind force = mass * velocity…

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