71–80 of 128 posts
So if it falls on its side, something that has a probably a 50% chance of happening, can it get back up? I always thought that for exploring another planet, you shouldn't really use something with wheels or wings. Something different like small "jumping robots" would make a lot more sense in a place where you have literally the ability to do 0-hardware maintenance. Instead of a single expensive flying robot, why not…
It would be interesting to see how the helicopter handles potential dust storms which can have winds of up to 94 km/hr.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Effect_of_dust...
You know helicopters in Mars is totally Phillip K Dick material. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_Time-Slip
https://youtu.be/oJGJEepIOt0?t=38
It's from Red Planet (2000):
Why not a few quadcopters like GoPro or something. I guess those are more stable and cheap.
The cost of failure is so high that these ideas have to be flushed out and tested for years. There is literally no way to fix these robots once (or even if) they make it to their destinations.
Not unless we figure out how to turn off gravity or invent teleportation.
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Aren't they pretty mild despite this, thanks to the very low density of the atmosphere?
They are, but this is a disaster waiting to happen anyway. Extremely high RPM, no redundancy in rotors or engines, flying in an environment full of dust and particles, having to land perfectly every time (or get damaged irreversibly), all these things add up to certain failure. It's definitely very cool, but it's not going to be nearly as reliable or useful as a land-based vehicle. Besides, aerial photos have general…
I'm not buying your blanket statement. Atmosphere is not the only limitation - optics are heavy.
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Are you a markov chain?
Yeah I get that the elite whites love NASA, so anyone daring to criticize them will be downvoted on here, but after maybe the 2000th spider web spun in microgravity maybe, just maybe, like we can start to improve human's lives now?
I thought just keeping rovers warm enough to operate was quite energy consuming.
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They are, but this is a disaster waiting to happen anyway. Extremely high RPM, no redundancy in rotors or engines, flying in an environment full of dust and particles, having to land perfectly every time (or get damaged irreversibly), all these things add up to certain failure. It's definitely very cool, but it's not going to be nearly as reliable or useful as a land-based vehicle. Besides, aerial photos have general…
> Besides, aerial photos have generally little value for Mars (at least for the surface area such a drone can cover) because the atmosphere is clear and you can get great imagery from space. I'm not buying your blanket statement. Atmosphere is not the only limitation - optics are heavy.
It depends on the optics. Modern optics for the visual range are incredibly light.
Also, since you assume optics are heavy, why do you think putting them on a drone is a good idea? You can haul a metric ton of optics in space for years (if not decades) but that drone can probably carry a handful of kg of equipment, and not that many cameras.
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Why don't they test the helicopter at 100k feet then?
Not having read the article, I am sure that they already did. Nothing gets sent beyond Earth's orbit without having gone through as much testing as is humanly possible on Earth. The cost of failure on Earth is several orders of magnitude less expensive than the cost of failure elsewhere. I would guess that sending a test helicopter along with another rover would be to do a feasibility test for larger flight-based pro…
However I agree with you, they will be testing it extensively in as close to Martian conditions as they can achieve.
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To piggy back off this, different news outlets have their own set of rules. For example, CNET (I think) wouldn't use upper case past 4 characters Example: NASA, Nascar
Style guides also tend to ignore funky punctuation, etc. in company names. For example, it was pretty standard to drop the ! in Yahoo!. There is certainly an argument for respecting the wishes of a name's owner but it's also understandable to do otherwise for readability. In this particular case, there are also a lot of acronyms that have entered such common usage (like radar) that capitalizing them would seem odd. A…