Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much can he bench?
On Earth or Mars?
I don’t think you’re supposed to hold your breathe when lifting…
NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
31–40 of 150 posts
Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
In a thin atmosphere, lifting a heavier payload needs bigger rotors or increased RPM, which increases power demands and structural stress. The challenge is to keep the vehicle light enough to fly while also making it sturdy enough to carry the payload and survive environments.
Why can’t “more rotors” be another solution?
Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#33Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#34On 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 d…
> If I remembered correctly they used a space hardened Power cpu
If you're remembering correctly, then I'm misremembering in that this has essentially a Snapdragon chip and not a rad hardened CPU at all
Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
However we might be willing to drive a lot more agressively if we know we can get a mechanic out to a stuck rover. Similarly, cheaper delivery might make a large number of smaller more disposable vehicles more appealing for many missions, just like what happened to satellites in the last decade.
Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#36Didn'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.
Yes, it did. I like the sentiment but I wonder how much conflict of interest would undermine this idea. Imagine how many companies are involved in developing space grade one-off hardware! Also, why would a highly bureaucratic structure undercut the amount of money that they themselves are asking for (and receiving) out of a budget? Savings are not aligned with the interest of such structure. Its not that for the amount you have saved you can allocate rest of the funds for something else (usually this is how it works with publicly funded projects AFAIK)
Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
One issue might be rotor span. Ingenuity has pretty big rotors to counter the thin atmosphere (about 4 feet top-to-tip). On earth rotor sizes are limited by the speed at the wing-tip. Once you make the rotor too long the tips start approaching supersonic speeds, giving you all kinds of weird mach effects. To make matters worse, the speed of sound is about 30% lower on Mars compared to near earth's surface.
Yea good point. Apparently the blade tip speed on Ingenuity is Mach 0.6-0.7!
Interesting note about this: the speed of sound on Mars is only ~70% of that on Earth, due to less atmospheric density. Might change your Mach numbers!
Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#38Didn'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.
Yes, it did. I like the sentiment but I wonder how much conflict of interest would undermine this idea. Imagine how many companies are involved in developing space grade one-off hardware! Also, why would a highly bureaucratic structure undercut the amount of money that they themselves are asking for (and receiving) out of a budget? Savings are not aligned with the interest of such structure. Its not that for the amou…
Well maybe they could start doing bigger and better missions, if they can reliably pull it off.
Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
One issue might be rotor span. Ingenuity has pretty big rotors to counter the thin atmosphere (about 4 feet top-to-tip). On earth rotor sizes are limited by the speed at the wing-tip. Once you make the rotor too long the tips start approaching supersonic speeds, giving you all kinds of weird mach effects. To make matters worse, the speed of sound is about 30% lower on Mars compared to near earth's surface.
What about multiple smaller rotors? Or would that cause weird turbulence effects? Could we use some kind of jet engine?
Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars
#40On 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 d…
> If I remembered correctly they used a space hardened Power cpu If you're remembering correctly, then I'm misremembering in that this has essentially a Snapdragon chip and not a rad hardened CPU at all
Maybe I am misremembering the interview. Maybe the person said that they used to use a hardened IBM power chip?