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JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

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Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#91

Post by dylan604 »

BotJunkie wrote: post #54
dylan604 wrote: post #44

"You'd shoot a little projectile from the drone that embeds itself in the cliff wall, and then you'd reel it back in with a sample." Is that what would happen? How does the embed de-embed itself? How does the reeling in not end up pulling the drone closer to the cliff?

I asked Bob about this. There are a bunch of options, but one way to do it is that you use a hollow projectile that takes a core sample, and then you just reel back in the core while the rest of the projectile stays in place.

Wow! Never did I expect that kind of response when I asked a random question on an internet forum. Thanks for the follow up!

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#92

Post by XorNot »

minitoar wrote: post #90
akiselev wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooof that's hard to swallow :(. Would the MSH be so productive that it makes up for the limited operating time? Is mission planning so meticulous that it would be a bottle neck anyway? What about winter? Whats the power budget for instruments during/after flight?

For reference the rovers can do 100 meters a day. 10km in one day is huge.

Yeah I was going to post this too: the range of a helicopter like that is massive. Well into the "find an interesting feature and follow it" range.

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#93

Post by XorNot »

mikepurvis wrote: post #24
trothamel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airships seem somewhat vulnerable to the weather, in practice, as they're always flying. A nice thing about a helicopter is you can land, and it's a station until you take off again.

I don't think we know too much at this point about how Ingenuity will survive dust storms— I see a reddit thread on this but not much else: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lo6k73/what_will_hap... If there was a dedicated mission for a much larger helicopter, it would obviously be important for it to have a story for weathering these things.

Dust storms on Mars aren't dust storms on Earth - we're not really talking damaging winds due to the low pressure. Moreover, since Ingenuity does fly, and blow air around, it's going to have a much better chance of cleaning it's own solar panels.

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#94

Post by XorNot »

BotJunkie wrote: post #53
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #42

Lots in here, taking me time to unpack. Kind of blue-sky - 30kG is heavy, so maybe its all moot - who's going to dedicate that much mass to this project. Any geology it does, will be contaminated by rotor wash scrubbing the surface material when it lands. Is that an issue? Maybe its a benefit. Can it really react to sample inaccessible places? What is the response time between capturing an image of a face, and gettin…

I interviewed Bob and wrote this article, so I can answer a few of these. I think JPL's idea is that MSH would be a dedicated helicopter mission, rather than piggybacking on some other mission, so it wouldn't be eating up the mass budget of another lander or rover. Similar to Ingenuity, the flights would be autonomous but the science wouldn't be. MSH would fly up to a cliff face (or whatever), take pictures, land, as…

Hopefully by the time this thing is ready to be built SpaceX have the Starship flying. Getting payload to Mars is going to get a lot cheaper if they hit even half their goals (even if we're just launching the rocket that goes to Mars on top of a Starship).

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#95

Post by trhway »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #86
trhway wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Kind of blue-sky - 30kG is heavy, so maybe its all moot - who's going to dedicate that much mass to this project. if it is delivered by Starship - and timeframe wise i guess it will be so - then there can be tens of those delivered while not being an even the main mission payload.

I’m looking forward to the swarm robotics Starship could enable. If we really get to the point where we are sending thousands of tons of payload to Mars (building a city) then we could have lots of cheap rovers instead of one big one. I designed a 3D printed plastic rover and I’m super curious how it would behave in Mars. An aluminum framed version with injection molded gears would be much more robust while staying l…

significant share, by mass, of the parts of such cheap simple rovers would probably be 3D printable - say using something like sand, clay or regolith laser sintering - right there on Mars. Basically one of the most important things to be solved on Mars would be to substitute as much as possible with locally produced components (kind of like Russia after international sanctions in 2014 :) That in particular means that the original designs should be very robust and simple in order to be amenable to such a local production. Kind of like do we want to bring rubber wheels all the way from Earth or may be we can locally produce something which would most probably be worse than rubber and thus the original design should account for increased vibration and roughness of the resulting ride.

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#96

Post by ncmncm »

Robotbeat wrote: post #76
ncmncm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries are better now than 10 years ago. Motors are better than 10 years ago. Solar is better than 10 years ago. Computers are better than 10 years ago. Each is not a huge amount better, but the improvements multiply out.

Not more than about 5-10% (at least at state of the art). Computers are the biggest argument, but again that's off-loadable to the rover. Again, if anyone said 10 years ago that a helicopter on Mars was not realistic, then they didn't know what they were talking about (it's funny how people who style themselves skeptics will learn like 5 facts about some place and then crown themselves an expert). I explored a simila…

0.9^4 = 0.66

34% better, in aviation, may easily make the difference between practical and not. In the case of Ingenuity, it appears to have made the difference between a need for custom SotA vs. COTS kit.

What computing could usefully be offloaded to the rover is very limited. Compressing video, maybe, and that just for power budget. I think Ingenuity has >10x MIPS than Perseverence.

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#97

Post by ncmncm »

aero-glide2 wrote: post #88
ncmncm wrote: post #69

I just hope they have more-experienced engineers to program its control system than on Ingenuity. They were super-lucky on that one. There is absolutely no way that time-registration navigation bug should have been able to have any effect whatsoever on the vehicle's dynamic stability. (You may be sure it wouldn't have, if the Nav guy had done the attitude control too.)

I disagree, it just shows that NASA was willing to take more risks/ fail-fast approach. "if you aren't failing you're not trying hard enough".

That is very far from the sort of risk they mean. Incompetence is never the place to squander your risk budget. There is plenty of competence on the ground, and it is not slower.

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#98

Post by ragebol »

XorNot wrote: post #94
BotJunkie wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed Bob and wrote this article, so I can answer a few of these. I think JPL's idea is that MSH would be a dedicated helicopter mission, rather than piggybacking on some other mission, so it wouldn't be eating up the mass budget of another lander or rover. Similar to Ingenuity, the flights would be autonomous but the science wouldn't be. MSH would fly up to a cliff face (or whatever), take pictures, land, as…

Hopefully by the time this thing is ready to be built SpaceX have the Starship flying. Getting payload to Mars is going to get a lot cheaper if they hit even half their goals (even if we're just launching the rocket that goes to Mars on top of a Starship).

Imagine deploying 100 of these helicopters deployed from a single Starship.

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#99

Post by TaylorAlexander »

trhway wrote: post #95
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m looking forward to the swarm robotics Starship could enable. If we really get to the point where we are sending thousands of tons of payload to Mars (building a city) then we could have lots of cheap rovers instead of one big one. I designed a 3D printed plastic rover and I’m super curious how it would behave in Mars. An aluminum framed version with injection molded gears would be much more robust while staying l…

significant share, by mass, of the parts of such cheap simple rovers would probably be 3D printable - say using something like sand, clay or regolith laser sintering - right there on Mars. Basically one of the most important things to be solved on Mars would be to substitute as much as possible with locally produced components (kind of like Russia after international sanctions in 2014 :) That in particular means that…

Yes local materials production on Mars will be important. But I think there will be a period before that is running where we could still send like ten simple rovers and that would be an interesting mission compared to how we have been doing it.

One thing of note, it’s too cold on Mars for rubber (as far as I can tell). The tires are one part of my robot that wouldn’t work. NASA developed some elastic-mode Nitinol tires that would do the trick.

Re: JPL's Plan for the Next Mars Helicopter

#100

Post by amelius »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #66
BotJunkie wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed Bob and wrote this article, so I can answer a few of these. I think JPL's idea is that MSH would be a dedicated helicopter mission, rather than piggybacking on some other mission, so it wouldn't be eating up the mass budget of another lander or rover. Similar to Ingenuity, the flights would be autonomous but the science wouldn't be. MSH would fly up to a cliff face (or whatever), take pictures, land, as…

The rotors would have to be massive to lift 30kg, that may be a stumbling block as it’ll require folding and so on. Seems like it would need a lander at least for recharging right?

Also, the rotors would blow away dust on the landing site, which may be a problem if you want to research dust, but may be an opportunity if you want to see what's beneath it.
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