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NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

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Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#21

Post by jvanderbot »

mmbop wrote: post #5
wyldfire wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing helicopter is extremely small and light, IIRC. less than one kg. So it definitely won't be picking up a 900kg rover, even if you tried to scale it up somehow. The atmosphere is just too thin to support anything but a minimal payload. But yeah having more helicopters might be feasible - for surveying the surface.

Is there a problem of scaling this up to say a 20kg payload? I’m not an aeronautical engineer, so I guess what I’m asking is if there is some problem scaling up flying machines in an extremely thin atmosphere?

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: 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.google.com keywords you want are "Mars Science Helicopter" and a good touchpoint author is T. Tzanetos or S. Withrow-Maser

Ames and JPL were still collaborating on this when I worked there.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#22

Post by jvanderbot »

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.google.com keywords you want are "Mars Science Helicopter" and a good touchpoint author is T. Tzanetos or S. Withrow-Maser

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#24

Post by Firaxus »

wyldfire wrote: post #3
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.

The existing helicopter is extremely small and light, IIRC. less than one kg. So it definitely won't be picking up a 900kg rover, even if you tried to scale it up somehow. The atmosphere is just too thin to support anything but a minimal payload. But yeah having more helicopters might be feasible - for surveying the surface.

I was surprised to learn that it’s actually a fair bit heavier. I was lucky enough to get to attend a talk by the head of the Ingenuity program, and he mentioned how the mass ballooned a bit to something under 5 pounds.

(Listed as 4 pounds on this official fact sheet) https://mars.nasa.gov/files/mars2020/MarsHelicopterIngenuity...

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#25

Post by csdreamer7 »

On Jupiter Broadcasting there was a lot of interviews on how this was a Linux powered device and could be the first of many new Linux devices on Mars by JPL. If I remembered correctly they used a space hardened Power cpu with an ancient version of Yocto since the newer versions of it did not have working drivers. When the rover had an issue they actually used the helicoptor's userspace command line GNU utilities to debug and get logs from the rover to send to Earth.

Also, this makes Mars the second planet that uses Linux more than Windows as noted by the tweet in the linux below. :-)

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/19/22291324/linux-perseveran...

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#27

Post by kibwen »

jessriedel wrote: post #8
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.

I think the current plan is that helicopters will be very light with minimal instrumentation and will be used mostly to scout ahead for rovers. The rovers will be much heavier and include many instruments. (Of course, all of NASA's long-term plans for Mars would be completely disrupted if Starship lowers the cost-per-kg of delivering equipment by two orders of magnitude, which arguably is likely.)

Making it more economical to escape Earth's gravity well isn't going to alter the physics of the Martian atmosphere or the relative utility of copters vs rovers for Martian exploration. Which is to say, even if you stationed humans on Mars, they'd still be exploring remotely via copter/rover pairs, just no longer with a human-to-robot latency measured in tens of minutes.
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