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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

#61

Post by jessriedel »

kibwen wrote: post #27
jessriedel wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

If you increase the mass and/or number of vehicles by 100x, a bajillion things will change.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#62

Post by dotnet00 »

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.

IIRC as a result of Ingenuity's success, one of the proposals for the Mars sample return mission architecture involved several helicopters to retrieve Perseverance's sample canisters (it drops them as it goes along, so that there's no worry about how to get the samples out of the rover in the future).

I should add though that the prospects of the parasites in Congress properly funding such a complex mission seem pretty low for now.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#63

Post by systems_glitch »

Kye wrote: post #20

Didn'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.

Applied Ion Systems is throwing these kind of rocks with small-scale electric space propulsion. It's interesting to see both the excitement and energy from eager researchers and hardcore hobbyists (cubesat folks), and the oftentimes rude and nasty pushback from industry.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#65

Post by inamberclad »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #25

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 d…

Fun fact - the cameras that captures Perseverance's landing are also Linux based and vim is installed - at least on the later model that I worked with.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#66

Post by wait_a_minute »

Yeah! Let's go NASA, Godspeed! USA, USA, USA!!! Not only has it already exceeded its objectives, but now it may generate even more useful data for new objectives...does anyone know if NASA maintains any kind of engineering blog or stream where we can learn more details about what went wrong and how they reconnected?

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#67

Post by bloopernova »

Jabbles wrote: post #50
deadbabe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not some helium balloon type craft that could float along with low power for longer periods of times? Could cover vast distances? Descend into fertile plains looking for samples?

Helium's lifting capability is proportional to the density of the atmosphere, which is very low on Mars.

Is it viable to use vacuum instead of helium?

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#68

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

heavyset_go wrote: post #58
iknowstuff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Elon Musk biography describes how a legacy aerospace engineer joined spacex and was tasked with a part: > He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’”

This is a terrifying anecdote.

You're talking about the $120k price tag right? Considering the reliability of Falcon 9.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#69

Post by willis936 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #58
iknowstuff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Elon Musk biography describes how a legacy aerospace engineer joined spacex and was tasked with a part: > He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’”

This is a terrifying anecdote.

From some perspectives, yes. From others it's not so bad. I love having cover from the top to do engineering and qualification to have better solutions. Normally it's "we don't have time or resources to make it, get back to the spreadsheet mines".

For LEO you can scoot by pretty easily with non-hardened solutions and better systems engineering and software. For deep space you'll need to be more clever.

Re: NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

#70

Post by icegreentea2 »

artemonster wrote: post #36
Kye wrote: post #20

Didn'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…

Every bit of money and platform resources (rad hardened CPUs are giant, slow and power inefficient compared to even semi modern COTS) is money and resources that NASA can spend on scientific payload on the same platform.

NASA absolutely does have some incentive to find savings in control hardware and software.

Finally, while Ingenuity does use a non-hardened Snapdragon, many other of its critical electronics components are still rad-hardened. The FPGA and dual MCUs (that actually do the low level control and I/O I assume) are both rad hardened. In addition, the COTS components that were used where screened by NASA for their performance in radiation.

The Snapdragon is really just there to control the radio, and do image processing. Critically, these are functions that have -some leeway- for timing, giving the option to just restart the Snapdragon if a watch dog detects a problem.

All of this to say is that rad-hardening isn't going away, but will probably stick around in many critical niches. What Ingenuity absolutely do is validate that modern COTS processors have a role to play in radiation elevated environments, including in semi-critical applications.

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