71–80 of 265 posts
Does anyone know why they chose to send a helicopter and not some kind of plane or glider? I would've thought that a fixed-wing aircraft would have been simpler, lighter, faster and more efficient.
How many runways do you see on Mars
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general the older nodes work better for radiation and other cosmic forces. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening That's why they don't use the latest and greatest in the space.
They work better primarily because they had previously invested in the tooling to rad-harden them and it’s really expensive to do that again one time for each mission; cheaper to rely on already-rad-hardened designs.
[1]- https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/1...
One of the things I find really cool about Ingenuity is how it is in large based on consumer hardware. The main processor is a Snapdragon 801 running Linux which communicates with Perseverance using the Zigbee protocol [1]. Perseverance on the other hand uses a RAD750 from 2001! If successful I hope this can lead to more modern hardware for these kinds of missions in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenui…
Also Linus finally got his progeny to Mars. That’s a pretty cool accomplishment:
“What have you built?”
Well, I invented one of the most prolific operating systems the world has ever seen, but not just this world - there is a helicopter on Mars that is flying due to the seeds which I planted that day...”
What have you built?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s less about longevity and more about reducing errors. Interestingly, Ingenuity has some sort of watchdog that can reset the Snapdragon in-flight fast enough to recover if there is an error.
Reminds me of SpaceX or Erlang; build a process that handles errors rather than an error free process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't radiation mostly cause random one-off errors rather than permanent defects? If so, then if the rad-harden stuff is 100x slower (which I think is approximately right?), it is almost certainly better to use error correction on non-rad-hardened hardware.
Many types of bit error are not recoverable without a full system reset. It isn't a matter of a simple "this bit in ram got corrupted", but more "this floating point unit has got into a state where it will not produce a result, and will therefore hang the entire processor". Therefore boot time becomes critical - if you end up rebooting due to bit errors multiple times per second, you can't afford to wait for Linux to…
I wonder how one could use micro kernels to further improve startup time and have a mini distributed OS/kernel for each component.
One of the things I find really cool about Ingenuity is how it is in large based on consumer hardware. The main processor is a Snapdragon 801 running Linux which communicates with Perseverance using the Zigbee protocol [1]. Perseverance on the other hand uses a RAD750 from 2001! If successful I hope this can lead to more modern hardware for these kinds of missions in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenui…
In general the older nodes work better for radiation and other cosmic forces. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening That's why they don't use the latest and greatest in the space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't radiation mostly cause random one-off errors rather than permanent defects? If so, then if the rad-harden stuff is 100x slower (which I think is approximately right?), it is almost certainly better to use error correction on non-rad-hardened hardware.
Many types of bit error are not recoverable without a full system reset. It isn't a matter of a simple "this bit in ram got corrupted", but more "this floating point unit has got into a state where it will not produce a result, and will therefore hang the entire processor". Therefore boot time becomes critical - if you end up rebooting due to bit errors multiple times per second, you can't afford to wait for Linux to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many runways do you see on Mars
What if a glider separated prior to the initial main landing? I guess that would increase the risks around the landing.
One of the things I find really cool about Ingenuity is how it is in large based on consumer hardware. The main processor is a Snapdragon 801 running Linux which communicates with Perseverance using the Zigbee protocol [1]. Perseverance on the other hand uses a RAD750 from 2001! If successful I hope this can lead to more modern hardware for these kinds of missions in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenui…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general the older nodes work better for radiation and other cosmic forces. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening That's why they don't use the latest and greatest in the space.
Can't all of the radiation issues be mitigated with proper shielding of the electronics?