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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

#201

Post by NotSammyHagar »

throwbadubadu wrote: post #166
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…

> which is otherwise a hard sci-fi book Hard sci-fi is still a story and doesn't need to nail everything. And it had other pretty "unrealistic" moments that put me more off than the storm. Foremost, how they fixed the missed orbital rendezvous, no never going to happen that way. Or that they could just revert their home flight and go once more back and back again, how much delta-v would that be, never could have had…

I thought in the martian they just looped the earth to go back, and then there was the supply rocket problem. They didn't do anything silly like just use the rocket to turn around and go straight back iirc.

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

#202

Post by blt »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #167
benj111 wrote: post #119

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…

Kennedy said "and returning him safely to the earth" in his moon landing proposal speech. It wasn't implicit (on the USA side at least).

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

#203

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

imglorp wrote: post #197
ragebol wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's math about physics (actually mechanical/aerospace engineering), not a guess.

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

#204

Post by LorenPechtel »

benj111 wrote: post #119
LorenPechtel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They chucked a lot of stuff--anything intended for surface use went out the airlock. The cost per pound to bring something back from the moon was higher than the cost per pound of basically anything they brought.

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.

A few years back I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on lifting stuff off the moon. At the time there was a company offering $200k/kg to lunar orbit, $1.2M/kg to the lunar surface. The Δv to climb back up is pretty much the same as the descent so I would expect the cost ratio to be similar: Thus $7.2M/kg returned to lunar orbit. At the time I wasn't concerned with going farther, but the escape/injection burn is about half the launch burn--thus you're looking at something like $17M/kg not counting the heat shield and chute (numbers I can't even back-of-the-envelope.)

How many objects are worth $17M/kg?

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

#205

Post by dotnet00 »

rtkwe wrote: post #196
dotnet00 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that you can reduced costs for some things via COTS, and if COTS stuff can handle the rough environment, there's also the possibility of reducing costs by further ruggedizing those parts.

Of course the mission critical stuff will still have to all be the usual expensive purpose built stuff, but like with Perseverance, some scientific instruments can use COTS computing hardware (IIRC one of the instruments on Perseverance has two Intel Atom SBCs, which were used to compress the landing footage before sending it back to Earth) and can have stuff like a bunch of non-essential but nice to have cameras, microphones and other sensors.

Since they were cheap and non-essential, it's no big deal to add them, no big deal if they don't work, but if they happen to work you get great PR and data, like proper video of a spacecraft autonomously landing from a rocket powered crane on another planet). Same with prototyping ideas. Maybe the success of Ingenuity will encourage the inclusion of other similar "pie in the sky", extremely low cost experimental components.

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

#206

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

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…

mass * velocity * velocity has units of energy. It's twice the kinetic energy.

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

#207

Post by penjelly »

so what type of missions could this reliably be used for in the future that justify the cost? it seems it flew for ~2 hours which seems expensive and risky to me? I know the craft was relatively cheap and the experiment was worth doing but going forward with mars, can we use these effectively somehow?

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

#208

Post by penjelly »

penjelly wrote: post #207

so what type of missions could this reliably be used for in the future that justify the cost? it seems it flew for ~2 hours which seems expensive and risky to me? I know the craft was relatively cheap and the experiment was worth doing but going forward with mars, can we use these effectively somehow?

nvm these craft are super inexpensive and obviously can get access to areas rovers cant

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

#209

Post by Tuna-Fish »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #64
mkl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Richard Garriot aka Lord British who made the Ultima series of videogames?

Correct. He also flew to the ISS in 2008.
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