NASA's Mars Helicopter Breaks Record In Challenging, Nerve-Wracking Flight (thehill.com) 27
NASA announced on Monday that Ingenuity's ninth flight was a success, as it undertook a "high-speed flight across unfriendly terrain." The Hill reports: Ingenuity flew for 166.4 seconds at a pace of 5 meters per second over a terrain of high slopes -- all new records for the helicopter. In preparation for the flight, NASA said, "First, we believe Ingenuity is ready for the challenge, based on the resilience and robustness demonstrated in our flights so far. Second, this high-risk, high-reward attempt fits perfectly within the goals of our current operational demonstration phase. A successful flight would be a powerful demonstration of the capability that an aerial vehicle (and only an aerial vehicle) can bring to bear in the context of Mars exploration -- traveling quickly across otherwise untraversable terrain while scouting for interesting science targets."
The Hill - adding value (Score:1)
Re:The Hill - adding value (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to Slashdot, a place where they get paid to send people to sites like that.
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Humanity is only going to exist as a goo soon enough... containing remnants of our intestinal biota. Serving as a bioreactor will be our legacy
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I like this guy. We just need to make it into one of those like HS chants.
Space Race! Space Race!
Keep up the pace!
Brace to be put into your place!
NASA! NASA!
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I think the result of the Space Race sucked the joy out of our lives.
The idea of space full of life, and bizarre and unique experiences, when exposed to be a lump of rock, with the same minerals we find on earth. With any chance of life found, will be a decades long investigation to make sure it didn't come from the stuff we sent over.
Now this stuff is still really interesting to scientists, but for the general public is nothing interesting just a lump of rock. Oh look a salty water puddle on Mars. A fl
Re:The Hill - adding value (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe instead of whining in faux outrage, you two should have used the other link and read the NASA article authored by JPL people who actually work on the project.
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There's nothing particularly disreputable about The Hill or the article. The article quoted the only official post-flight statement NADA/JPL has released concerning the flight, which was a tweet with a photo of Ingenuity's shadow. NASA's Ingenuity website has nothing more; I don't know what more you could reasonably expect - if you've been following the mission, you know that it takes NASA several days to download flight video and release it to the public.
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Jeeze, that "article" on that website was incredible, in that it's incredible they had the gall to simply repurpose other people's work and present it as their own. They brought absolutely nothing new to the party.
This isn't an unpopular phenomenon. Tech news sites do this all the time. I've seriously seen articles that were copied almost verbatim but had a link at the bottom of the article which only led to another site that did exactly the same thing.
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An Article of a Twitter post. It is like the news sites that follow Elon Musk companies.
Want to know about the Status of the production of the Cyber-truck?
Well over a course of nearly two years, after we got information from the window cracking release. We got the following information.
* Limited Production Expected at the end of 2021 (Does that mean a dozen, a hundred, a thousand)
* There are no handle (Door handle, like the Mustang Mach-e? The door will auto open for you?)
* There will be rear wheel steerin
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"Jeeze, that "article" on that website was incredible, in that it's incredible they had the gall to simply repurpose other people's work and present it as their own"
Since the helicopter's specs don't include any nerves, the 'nerve-wrecking' part could be theirs.
How did they know it was unfriendly? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: How did they know it was unfriendly? (Score:2)
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"it undertook a "high-speed flight across unfriendly terrain."". How did they know that? Did they just assume? Maybe it would be friendly if they just asked first.
They tried that, but their greeting wasn't met with a response. Normally we'd assume the terrain is unfriendly as a result, but I suppose we're dealing with alien worlds, so it's entirely possible the terrain simply didn't understand "hello".
Yours is a good reminder to not assume, especially when working at the intersection of linguistics and xenotopography.
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They tried that, but their greeting wasn't met with a response. Normally we'd assume the terrain is unfriendly as a result, but I suppose we're dealing with alien worlds, so it's entirely possible the terrain simply didn't understand "hello".
Obviously they should have tried "Ba weep granna weep ninny bong" instead.
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Congratulations NASA (Score:2)
The success of Ingenuity will, eventually, lead to processes to soar through the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, enabling us to capture a more full and detailed examination of our home solar system. Who knows what wonders await us on those other planets?
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Who knows what wonders await us on those other planets?
Me. I've been there, it's rubbish.
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The success of Ingenuity will, eventually, lead to processes to soar through the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, enabling us to capture a more full and detailed examination of our home solar system.
Gas giant atmospheric explorers gain basically nothing from Ingenuity's successes. Ingenuity is energy-intensive. It spends nearly all of its time sitting on the surface recharging its batteries from solar panels. The gas giants are so far out that solar panels are nearly useless and their surfaces are inaccessible, to put it mildly. Gas giant atmospheric explorers will be nuclear powered blimps or zeppelins, not solar powered helicopters. There is essentially no overlap whatsoever.
The atmosphere of Ve
New planet, everything is a new record (Score:2)
I do not know the capacity of the helicopter, but if it is less than 5 minutes, I would be shocked.
One minute sounds impressive enough to be worth an article, but 30 seconds is something NASA should brag about to themselves, not to us.
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Yeah, nothing impressive at all about a helicopter flying autonomously on another planet.
For the record, according to https://mars.nasa.gov/technolo... [nasa.gov], the power specs are: "Solar panel charges Lithium-ion batteries, providing enough energy for one 90-second flight per Martian day (~350 Watts of average power during flight)", so where did you get your idiotic idea that it should go 5 minutes or more?
Re:New planet, everything is a new record (Score:4, Interesting)
For the record, according to https://mars.nasa.gov/technolo [nasa.gov]..., the power specs are: "Solar panel charges Lithium-ion batteries, providing enough energy for one 90-second flight per Martian day (~350 Watts of average power during flight)", so where did you get your idiotic idea that it should go 5 minutes or more?
Neither you nor Joce640k are good at reading. This flight was 166 seconds long. Did you know that 166 is greater than 90? I bet you did. In fact four of its nine flights so far have been longer than 90 seconds.
The 90 second limitation is the daily flight limit purely because of the capacity of the solar panels. The battery is higher capacity than that. And regardless, it is not power constrained. It's not allowed to fly as long as the batteries can keep it aloft because the rotor bearings would overheat first, destroying it. The Martian atmosphere is too thin to adequately ventilate the rotors for sustained flight.
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I do not know the capacity of the helicopter, but if it is less than 5 minutes, I would be shocked.
You'd better sit down: It can only fly for 90 seconds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Wracking (Score:2)
"Wracking" ?