Mars Helicopter 'Ingenuity' Completes Its 40th Flight on Mars (space.com) 20
"NASA's tiny Ingenuity helicopter now has 40 off-Earth flights under its belt," reports Space.com:
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity lifted off yet again on Thursday (Jan. 19), staying aloft for nearly 92 seconds on a sortie that covered about 584 feet (178 meters) of horizontal distance. The flight repositioned Ingenuity, moving it from "Airfield Z" on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater to "Airfield Beta," according to the mission's flight log. That journey took the little chopper over some sand dunes, as imagery captured during the hop shows....
Ingenuity is a technology demonstrator designed to show that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet's thin atmosphere. The helicopter's prime mission covered just five flights, which Ingenuity knocked out shortly after touching down inside Jezero. The chopper then shifted into an extended mission, during which it has been pushing its flight capabilities and serving as a scout for Perseverance. The helicopter's aerial observations help the rover team identify potentially interesting scientific targets and pick the best routes through the rugged landscapes on Jezero's floor.
Ingenuity is a technology demonstrator designed to show that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet's thin atmosphere. The helicopter's prime mission covered just five flights, which Ingenuity knocked out shortly after touching down inside Jezero. The chopper then shifted into an extended mission, during which it has been pushing its flight capabilities and serving as a scout for Perseverance. The helicopter's aerial observations help the rover team identify potentially interesting scientific targets and pick the best routes through the rugged landscapes on Jezero's floor.
It's good tech (Score:1, Funny)
Yep, it's good tech.
Check out my Ingenuity Helicopter teardown video for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Oh. Wow. A rickroll. How very 2010 of you.
Re:It's good tech (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh. Wow. A rickroll. How very 2010 of you.
Thanks for letting everybody know. They really appreciate how smart you are for figuring it out all by yourself!
(and won't be inviting you to any parties anytime soon)
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They see me rollin', they be hatin'...
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Oh. Wow. A rickroll. How very 2010 of you.
(facepalm)
The clue was in the fact that I was claiming to have done a fucking teardown video for Youtube.
Did you really believe that ? Where exactly did I get the helicopter? Aliexpress?
Re: It's good tech (Score:3)
Right? What kind of fucking moron would take someone on a sci/tech site at face value and hope, just hope, that maybe this guy works for or adjacent to JPL, and might have some sexy video of the guts of one of the niftier toys we've sent to Mars in recent history?
I'm with AC, and as I have no idea who you are because your posts are generally under my thresholds, I really should have checked your posting history before wasting my time. Fuck off back to Facebook you shitposing cocksniff. If you have to explai
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Posts like this are pure oxygen to me.
The form units are used are funny (Score:1)
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Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to overstate what an incredible achievement this has been - engineering a solar-powered helicopter that has to operate in an atmosphere less than 1% of that of the Earth's, totally autonomously, and getting right on the first try. It went from a mere tech demo that had a high probability of crashing on its very first flight, to an incredibly useful and fundamental part of the mission, science and route planning for the rover itself.
It has spent over an hour total in flight, covering a distance of 5 miles.
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It must have been as hard hell to test on Earth. You can chop weight off the payload to simulate Mars' gravity (in a vacuum tank), but not every part can be reduced if you want to test how materials and shapes react also, such as flex and vibration.
Give the chopper team a nice shiny medal.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. I would have thought it would be possible to use a scale model to simulate reduced gravity, but apparent that wasn't done. From a paper entitled Hover and Forward Flight Performance Modeling of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter [nasa.gov]
To simulate Mars conditions for flight tests, the chamber was evacuated and then backfilled with CO2 to achieve a
density of [rho] = 0.0175 kg/m3. Nevertheless, the temperature of the chamber was left at its ambient level of T = 20.
For hover testing, a full-scale prototype was developed. The prototype’s rotor speed was fixed at 2,600 RPM; thus, for
the 1.21 m diameter rotor, the tip speed was 165 m/s, or M[tip] = 0.62. To simulate the reduced gravitational pull on Mars with respect to Earth’s, certain elements of the rotorcraft were removed to reduce weight, such as the power source for prototype hover testing. Rather, power was fed to the prototype via an electrical tether.
The future of space warfare... (Score:2)
...is dropping improvised explosives over martian trenches.
Send 1500 of them up there (Score:2)
Then we get more than the Google car.