Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

RugnirViking · 2024-01-26T09:56:54

I don't know a lot about these missions. Does the rover have a sample gathering arm? would it be possible for the helicopter to be picked up and set onto something? or carried around? seems like it would be useful to have the backup connection route to the rover like when they used the helicopter to troubleshoot the rover a while back. Or alternatively even as a backup sensor suite for the rover.

Plus the imagery of the rover carrying around its wounded little friend is too nice to pass up on

synapsomorphy · 2024-01-25T20:35:53

I just interned at the NASA office (at Ames) that designed large chunks of and did a lot of flight planning / analysis for Ingenuity. It had some really awesome people behind it and its success inspired a number of new Mars rotorcraft missions (rotorcraft will be an integral part of Mars Sample Return). Flight is going to be a huge part of future solar system exploration efforts and Ingenuity paved the way.

o7

contact9879 · 2024-01-25T21:02:11

Isn't Mars Sample Return pretty much dead at this point?

synapsomorphy · 2024-01-25T21:14:45

I contributed to the helicopter design for it so I'm biased but I think it'll happen eventually even if the funding isn't approved this administration/year/decade. The already-stashed samples will be up there basically forever, and we'll probably want samples from a few different areas anyways, so it makes sense to go grab them.

ugh123 · 2024-01-26T05:48:47

I hope the development of the MAV will bring us closer to building launch vehicles capable of getting humans off Mars. Seems like the MAV is preloaded with fuel and pretty small but should provide some good data for future missions.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/#Ascent-Vehicle

dcsommer · 2024-01-25T21:50:57

Mars has weather, unlike the moon. Will the samples really still be there a decade or two from now?

wharvle · 2024-01-25T22:02:12

Mars' famous dust storms aren't so good at causing damage, because the air's really, really thin, so they can't pick up heavy particles even with high wind speeds. A serious problem if you need to keep grit out of fine machinery or electronics, not so much if you're worried about erosion (I mean, yeah, eventually it'd be a problem, but it's slow-motion compared to the erosion of something exposed to sand storms on Earth)

I guess it could eventually get buried, but I'd expect that to also be a slow process on most parts of the planet, for similar reasons. The only forces seriously driving weathering on the planet are radiation and wind—the radiation's pretty bad but not a problem for metal + some rocks that were already on the surface, at least over a span of a couple decades, and the wind just can't deliver much force because the atmosphere's so very thin (that's also why it's fairly difficult to fly on Mars).

somenameforme · 2024-01-26T04:46:14

As a fun anecdote this is one of the very few things that was completely faked in "The Martian" - book and movie alike, which is otherwise a hard sci-fi book. I think it's quite telling when your instigator for a disaster scenario on Mars has to be faked!

Well at least intentionally faked. It turns out Martian regolith/soil is also much more moist than expected so getting water will be relatively easy, but at the time of the book this wasn't known!

throwbadubadu · 2024-01-26T06:35:30

> which is otherwise a hard sci-fi book

Hard sci-fi is still a story and doesn't need to nail everything. And it had other pretty "unrealistic" moments that put me more off than the storm. Foremost, how they fixed the missed orbital rendezvous, no never going to happen that way. Or that they could just revert their home flight and go once more back and back again, how much delta-v would that be, never could have had that much extra fuel at least in that world... and other minor things, but still superb story.

omoikane · 2024-01-26T06:31:50

> The Martian

The thin atmosphere bit is acknowledged by the author, you can watch his talk here around 32:35:

    I just want to be as accurate as I possibly could.  There are a few places that are inaccurate.  The biggest place that's inaccurate is right at the beginning.  Don't tell anybody, but if you're in a dust storm on Mars, you're not even going to feel it.  Mars' atmosphere is less than 1% of Earth's.  So a 150 kilometer an hour wind would feel like about 1 kilometer an hour wind does on Earth.  It wouldn't do any damage to anything.

https://youtu.be/gMfuLtjgzA8?si=8aZUEizDWuBhnaJg&t=1958

There is another clarification later at 35:34 saying the dust storm is basically like talcum powder.

rob74 · 2024-01-26T08:21:42

Well yeah, he needed some sort of catastrophic event to set the rest of the story in motion, and a huge dust storm which forces an evacuation and then separates Mark Watney from the rest of the crew was just the thing, so he added it although he was fully aware that storms don't work that way on Mars...

generalizations · 2024-01-26T05:07:24

To be fair, it wasn't even the only disaster scenario in the movie - but it's very difficult to come up with a realistic scenario where someone would get left behind with a livable hab.

jenadine · 2024-01-26T06:13:08

How about a fight between members of the crew causing the mission to be cancelled, and one of the member left for dead after a violent interaction with another member who then lie about it.

jo38j8o3jo8rj3 · 2024-01-26T06:49:02

I remember some nasa administrator laughing about that at a conference. "So at the end of the movie the atmosphere is so thin that he can fly through it at thousands of miles per hour without harm, but at the beginning a sandstorm at hundreds of miles per hour destroys the ship? Also the spacesuits ... no."

synapsomorphy · 2024-01-25T22:14:32

Yes, they will. The weather on Mars can't do much to metal tubes. They probably won't be buried either (the area they're in doesn't get much net deposition, you can tell from how rocky it is), but if that does happen, each sample's position and the terrain around them is very precisely mapped so it would be extremely unlikely that any get completely lost.

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9337/nasas-perseverance-rover-com...

krisoft · 2024-01-25T22:13:30

We are talking about 6 inch long titanium tubes. What do you imagine the weather doing to them in a few decades?

onepointsixC · 2024-01-25T21:56:22

The samples are meant to survive the vacuum of space but can't handle some weather? That seems unlikely.

robertlagrant · 2024-01-25T22:02:23

How erosive is the vacuum of space meant to be?

timschmidt · 2024-01-25T22:28:19

You mean that place that smells of burnt metal and is full of hard radiation? Surface of Mars is definitely more hospitable.

BuildTheRobots · 2024-01-26T02:01:50

> Overall, astronauts often compare the smell of space to "hot metal, burnt meat, burnt cakes, spent gunpowder and welding of metal," according to Steve Pearce, a biochemist and CEO of Omega Ingredients, who combed through astronaut interviews to help him craft a NASA-commissioned scent: https://www.livescience.com/space/what-does-space-smell-like

Guess I'm one of today's 10,000.

alfiopuglisi · 2024-01-26T08:59:55

Wouldn't it be the smell of space suits and space stations, rather than space itself? I don't think astronauts have tried to breath the few particles in the vacuum.

toomuchtodo · 2024-01-26T05:46:20

They made a perfume of it.

https://eaudespace.com/

iancmceachern · 2024-01-26T04:03:26

Not less erosive though.

inamberclad · 2024-01-26T00:34:54

I'd wager yes since Mars has less extreme thermal cycles than the moon

admissionsguy · 2024-01-26T00:33:36

I would expect muskonauts will make the samples redundant by then.

pvaldes · 2024-01-26T09:02:54

It depends on sample location. After discovering patches of water ice, the planet is more interesting than ever.

mturmon · 2024-01-25T23:48:44

No. It's probably better to think of the multi-mission MSR "campaign" as being reformulated to be lower cost and complexity.

rockemsockem · 2024-01-26T05:50:15

Why do you say that?

qwertox · 2024-01-25T22:20:38

> o7

I never came across this emoticon, but with what you wrote, its meaning became clear immediately. It's perfect.

rubinlinux · 2024-01-25T23:16:19

It is a very common theme in Elite Dangerous, to the point that the station controller will sometimes say "Oh seven, commander" to you.

datameta · 2024-01-25T23:31:25

Also ubiquitous in Eve Online since about 15 years ago. Did it originate in Elite Dangerous?

closewith · 2024-01-26T00:38:06

No, predates broadband at least. Certainly was around on Usenet in the nineties.

knowaveragejoe · 2024-01-26T05:49:53

This is where I was first exposed to it. I'm not surprised it's got a longer history than that, though.

farnsworth · 2024-01-25T22:23:50

Same, I thought I was terminally online but I've never seen this before.

closewith · 2024-01-25T23:07:19

Oh, God, these comments may be the trigger to my mid-life crisis.

zilti · 2024-01-26T08:05:46

If it's any consolation, it's been around since the 90s

whamlastxmas · 2024-01-25T23:21:58

I remember being a terminally online teen thinking i would never fall out of “what’s hip” bc i enjoyed being online so much at the time. I have since never once installed or used TikTok and I have no idea what’s happening I am sure

Angostura · 2024-01-25T23:27:05

See it quite a lot in Twitch chat

notso411 · 2024-01-25T23:38:55

amatecha · 2024-01-26T06:15:23

For the people who weren't aware... https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/orz

noduerme · 2024-01-26T02:04:50

Funny, I didn't see it as a salute... I thought it was a "flex".

klyrs · 2024-01-25T22:30:53

Looks like a swimmer to me... what do you see?

jconnop · 2024-01-25T22:36:52

The 'o' is a head and the '7' is an arm giving a salute.

rkagerer · 2024-01-25T22:55:39

Here, let me help you with that...

   O7
  /|
   Λ

klyrs · 2024-01-25T23:03:02

That's ridiculous, nobody swims up a waterfall

(but actually, thanks for the illustration... my dad was in the military but apparently long enough ago that I entirely missed this)

Edit: oh! You used a capital O rather than a little one! That makes loads of difference... the "hand" placement in o7 is way over the forehead, while O7 (or is it 07? either way) is much closer to a proper salute! Perhaps the military culture hasn't entirely worn off after all...

frickinLasers · 2024-01-26T00:26:30

It's also the wrong hand. But I think the little o looks more like a head in this case. O7 just looks like a hex code or something.

throwawaaarrgh · 2024-01-26T00:43:13

Right hand if you're standing behind him...

ordu · 2024-01-25T23:17:32

Ah... it makes sense. I thought it was a head being scratched.

kayodelycaon · 2024-01-25T22:36:46

It's a salute. :)

nosrepa · 2024-01-25T22:39:27

It's a salute.

shocks · 2024-01-25T22:38:42

A salute

jprd · 2024-01-25T22:37:02

> o7

Someone saluting

donquichotte · 2024-01-25T21:30:09

For anyone interested in the structure of the software that ran Ingenuity (and some hardware design aspects, such as the use of commercial off-the-shelve parts), there is an awesome and critically underwatched video of Timothy Canham explaining everything:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQu9m4MG5Gc&t=7s

geor9e · 2024-01-26T00:50:54

I always thought it was crazy that NASA uses a FPGA/microcontroller/cell phone SOC setup, which makes total sense to me, but mundane industrial things like the traffic light at an intersection needs a giant cabinet with shelves of crazy seimens controllers, it feels like such overkill in comparison, you can see them on this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udpB-en9KKM . The guy is always arguing with the commenters that its all needed for safety. I never could figure out why some company doesnt come up with a NASA-sized solution to control the worlds intersections instead.

Kuinox · 2024-01-26T01:09:43

It's not needed for safety, but for liability. The equipment is costly because it need to be certified, because every piece of equipment inside will need to be certified. Engineers in this field are averse to new technology because they are liable if something goes wrong.

ballooney · 2024-01-26T08:27:05

Infact, NASA wouldn’t use that sort of SOC for anything critical like the rover itself. Ingenuity was always a marginal experiment with a correspondingly high appetite for risk and ability to accept budgetary compromises.

PretzelPirate · 2024-01-25T20:24:30

They should auction it off. For pickup only, of course.

I'd like to own the first helicopter on Mars.

oliwary · 2024-01-25T21:32:47

Show HN: This website is served from a helicopter on Mars

m463 · 2024-01-25T22:39:01

42 minute delay or interplanetary hug of death?

WJW · 2024-01-25T22:15:34

Imagine the latency though.

daemonologist · 2024-01-25T22:25:09

Imagine the egress fees (actually I imagine ingress would be more expensive than we're used to too).

rich_sasha · 2024-01-25T23:06:52

First item on the to-do: add a CDN

oliwary · 2024-01-25T23:27:14

I hear spaceflare has decent offerings

grotorea · 2024-01-25T23:40:19

Nothing on nebulaflare.

caseysoftware · 2024-01-25T20:54:52

That's an amazing idea.

Not only could they have fun with that stage but it'd be a fun race to see who could get it for them. Then have a big show when it's brought back to Earth and delivered to the owner.

I could see SpaceX and FedEx team up for some amusing PR on that one.

Apocryphon · 2024-01-25T21:23:03

FedEx you say?

https://tenor.com/view/expanse-the-expanse-fedex-gif-1316756...

givemeethekeys · 2024-01-25T20:32:03

It's going to be on display at the Visitor Center when your grandkids visit.

adastra22 · 2024-01-25T20:43:10

You joke, but Russia did that with their moon rover.

mkl · 2024-01-25T21:19:11

In 1993, to Richard Garriott, for just $68,000: https://www.space.com/8073-privately-owned-soviet-moon-rover...

varjag · 2024-01-26T08:34:42

Good luck getting Russia acknowledging the deal as still valid today.

smcin · 2024-01-26T00:24:36

But technically Russia might not have owned title to it in the first place. Sounds almost like an NFT before NFTs existed: --

Space lawyer, Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz (University of Mississippi) said:

without reading the papers or knowing how they were processed and by whom, she can't speak to the validity of the ownership of a space object purchased at auction.

"However, a contention that buying a space object that landed on the lunar surface from a sovereign nation gives rise to a property right to the territory under it is wrong"... said that States-Parties to the Outer Space Treaty of 1966 cannot acquire lunar territory by landing an object on the moon. "The USSR was and Russia is a party to the Outer Space Treaty. It did not acquire the territory under the object when it landed. One cannot sell what one does not own. Since USSR/Russia did not have a property right to the territory under the landed object, there was nothing to sell."

pavel_lishin · 2024-01-26T04:05:39

It sounds more like Rai stones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

lukan · 2024-01-26T01:14:20

Yeah, but the rover itself was in possesion of russia and is now in posession of Garriot. That is undisputed.

What is rightfully disputed, is whether he also owns the land under the rover. He would like to, but not possible with current laws.

adastra22 · 2024-01-26T05:16:23

> What is rightfully disputed, is whether he also owns the land under the rover. He would like to, but not possible with current laws.

Actually, contrary to the opinion of Ms. Gabrynowicz, current case law and government/agency positions represented by the Artemis Accords reflect Mr. Garriot's claim. It may have been an untested hypothetical at the time, but in the current political climate it is finding support by all the relevant players. In fact they go even further in asserting exclusions zones much larger than just the regolith undermining a lander or rover.

lukan · 2024-01-26T08:18:39

"In fact they go even further in asserting exclusions zones much larger than just the regolith undermining a lander or rover."

I really hope this won't become reality in the mind of confrontation and being first to claim land, because this will mean, spamming the moon surface with cheap "scientific" equipment to claim lots of land. I mean, what is the bar here for lander? Is it enough to have a flag with it? Then you can have a flag inside a steel cannon ball and shoot many of them across the lunar landscape.

TedDoesntTalk · 2024-01-25T21:47:44

Richard Garriot aka Lord British who made the Ultima series of videogames?

lmz · 2024-01-25T22:24:38

Yes. Also a space tourist.

dgacmu · 2024-01-25T21:20:46

Better investment than an NFT, at least.

doubleorseven · 2024-01-26T06:44:24

I would first check the software license and if i have the "right to repair" on this beauty.

madduci · 2024-01-26T04:45:46

I wonder if they will pick up the trash or we are just littering everywhere in space

hotpotamus · 2024-01-25T21:13:05

Hasselblad liked to advertise that there were a couple free ones on the moon, you just had to pick them up. To save weight for more sample returns, the Apollo astronauts did the logical thing and kept the film, but chucked the cameras out on the moon.

LorenPechtel · 2024-01-25T22:51:41

They chucked a lot of stuff--anything intended for surface use went out the airlock. The cost per pound to bring something back from the moon was higher than the cost per pound of basically anything they brought.

benj111 · 2024-01-26T00:27:50

Depends.

If the primary point was to put a man on the moon, the cost of bringing things back is basically free.

If on the other hand the primary mission was bringing back as many rocks as possible, then yes, the return would be very expensive.

vel0city · 2024-01-26T04:28:18

> the cost of bringing things back is basically free.

No, because they'd still have to pay to bring all the extra fuel to get the junk back up off the moon and back to Earth. And before that spend the cost of that extra fuel getting it up there. When every pound is like thousands of dollars it really adds up.

NoZebra120vClip · 2024-01-26T06:41:57

It's interesting to think about:

The stated mission for the Space Race has often been "put a man in orbit", "put a man on the Moon", "put staff in the space station for X period".

But implicit in all of those mission designs has been the goal of returning the crew alive and in one piece. The record is rather favorable in that regard, and it's always a tragedy when we lose someone.

So that's one of the reasons a crewed Mars missions is a daunting prospect: because even with improved technology, it may be a one-way trip.

imtringued · 2024-01-26T08:01:17

Well, it's more of a pyramid scheme. You can send more people to mars than you can send back to earth. So nothing prevents Elon Musk from sending "100" people to mars and 10 person back. Then the people who want to return can lie about how awesome it is on mars and convince more of them to come to secure their own return trip.

intrasight · 2024-01-25T21:25:53

As long as only public museums are allowed to participate

netsharc · 2024-01-25T21:00:17

Huh, a bit like NFTs (or not at all?), the bragging rights that you have ownership of something on Mars is probably worth some change, especially if you're a billionaire.

0cf8612b2e1e · 2024-01-25T21:35:08

A bit like giant stone money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-...

nickthegreek · 2024-01-25T20:20:49

RIP little guy. This project was worth it for the marketing they got out it alone. I've seen so many stories about it since its launch. I hope it resonated with today's youth and gets them interested in space exploration.

fredthedeadhead · 2024-01-25T20:28:11

Are images of the damage available to the public?

"Imagery revealing damage to the rotor blade arrived several days later."

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/after-three-years-on-mars-nasa...

dfcab · 2024-01-25T20:29:45

There is a picture of the helicopter that has arrows in your link, click next and you will see the tip of the blade in a shadow. :(

Redoubts · 2024-01-25T21:28:51

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26243-ingenuity-spots-the...

fredthedeadhead · 2024-01-25T21:53:19

Thanks, I missed that!

It looks like it landed on quite an incline, almost 45 degrees.

imglorp · 2024-01-25T21:04:24

Everything about the mission provided valuable data: especially that damaged blade. Failure modes are useful. Next, it might be useful to try flying anyway.

If not, they still have running cameras, sensors and computer, until Perseverance moves out of range.

ragebol · 2024-01-25T21:15:33

The rotors will be unbalanced (even if the other side also broke off, chances of the same amount breaking of are as remote as the thing itself), so it will vibrate and probably tip over if it spins too hard

NoZebra120vClip · 2024-01-25T20:37:58

It takes a few hours to Photoshop over the bite-marks and claw-gouges.

hall0ween · 2024-01-25T21:06:16

lol nice

omgmajk · 2024-01-25T20:25:46

Three years and over 70 flights. That is pure wonder! RIP little guy, you did well.

happytiger · 2024-01-26T02:41:19

Poor little buddy broke a wing. Little thing was perhaps the coolest space project ever to my inner 12 year old. My whole family just lived the drama of this whole project. So cool.

I don’t know about the rest of you but we’re going to pour one out for the little guy.

And high compliments to the team that pulled this off. This was an astounding project.

1970-01-01 · 2024-01-25T20:18:06

72 flights is a lot for an experimental craft, on Mars, running Linux.

gokhan · 2024-01-25T20:20:18

With off-the-shelf components.

shaunpud · 2024-01-26T00:30:25

Arch?

nexawave-ai · 2024-01-26T06:43:04

Maybe sometime in the future NASA will deploy a service or repair pit stop station for all their crafts on Mars. Imagine that, if a craft is damaged another automaton is deployed to retrieve the damaged craft where it is transported to the pit stop to be fixed or for routine maintenance. This will improve service life and only the service station would need manual intervention ie. Restocking for parts.

So you would have a service station and a manufacturing station, that's nuclear powered and retrofitted with a 3D printer that can produce custom crafts on Mars.

I often ponder about what will the result be of having a human colony on Mars or the Moon? Think about the ethical implications, what about if someone commits a murder? Or breaks a law ( will there even be laws? Who creates the law? Who will deliver judgement? Will there be a jury? ) it just breaks my mind.

anigbrowl · 2024-01-25T23:18:55

It's pretty great that the point of failure is one of the prop blades vs the cheap-as-chips electronic components. Of course I'm sorry to see it out of commission, but istm they can keep using the cameras, both to gather some information about the weather and to see how long the various components & batteries keep working - at least until it's time to move the rover out of range. Since flight is no longer an option I wonder if the CPU and MCUs can be repurposed to some other sort of task like image analysis.

All in all I think Ingenuity's mission history is a strong argument for experimentation over total advance planning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)#Opposit...

gokhan · 2024-01-25T20:19:17

Damage to the blade tip is apparent in the shadow. But I would try one more flight just to see how it fares in such conditions, if it can be corrected in software etc.

rtkwe · 2024-01-25T20:55:10

To fly Ingenuity has to spin it's propellers very quickly due to the lower atmospheric density compared to Earth and that's a large chunk taken out of the blade. We can already guess what'll happen without testing it and it'll be some variation of the craft shaking itself to pieces and throwing debris all over that chunk of Mars. Better to just let it sit than toss all sorts of trash across the surface that could hit the rover.

LorenPechtel · 2024-01-25T23:03:33

Yup. I get the impression this was a forced landing, it put itself down on too steep a slope and caused a rotor strike. Helicopters do not like unbalanced rotors! And think of what happens if it fails at speed: The rotors are 4' across, so 2' from tip to hub. 2,400 rpm for the low end of flight speed. That's 40 rotations per second, the average speed of a rotor is therefore 40 rps * 2' * (2 * pi {path traced by the rotor}) / 2 {for the midpoint of the rotor} = 251 feet per second = 172 miles per hour. A rotor yeeted at 172 miles per hour will go quite a ways on Mars (especially since it's on a slope--it could be lobbed at an angle, not merely flat) and there's a very, very expensive spacecraft nearby. (And it must be nearby--Ingenuity can't talk to Earth. You can't back off to a safe distance and try it.)

prismic · 2024-01-25T23:45:09

They talked about why they don't think it will fly anymore in the media briefing:

- Ingenuity is balanced down to fractions of a gram, and any imbalance, especially at the speed that Ingenuity spins its rotor at, will cause the spacecraft to tear itself apart.

- Most of the lift comes from the last 25 - 30% of its lift capacity. They think they lost about 25% of the rotor blade, and even if somehow the other blades lost the exact same amount to be completely balanced, there's just not enough lift left.

1970-01-01 · 2024-01-25T20:33:44

Budget-wise, it's not worth trying anything else. There is a lot of prop damage here:

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/e1-pia26243-...

jtriangle · 2024-01-26T09:23:46

Might as well yolo it at this point

0134340 · 2024-01-25T22:50:51

That is just genius. NASA is wasting all this money on engineers when they could just ask HN.

Dylan16807 · 2024-01-26T03:41:47

Don't be an ass. Someone saying what they would do isn't a criticism of NASA's ability to engineer. If it was worded more strongly it might be a criticism of NASA management, but even then neither side would be objectively correct.

bluGill · 2024-01-25T21:23:59

They can easily mimic the damage on earth. While there is more gravity, we can adjust atmosphere and measure lift, vibration and whatever. Probably modern engineering tools can do this all in software, but cutting the blade off a drone on earth is easy. Only if we are convinced by on earth simulation that we can still fly this should we attempt it. Otherwise attempting flight this risks doing more damage to something else. (the rover is too far away, so I guess not much - but that also means we can't observe what happens and adjust based on the rovers sensors)

JshWright · 2024-01-25T21:28:57

They can also account for gravity by pulling up on it with a tether (in a large vacuum chamber simulating the Martian atmosphere). That's how they tested the design originally.

dfcab · 2024-01-25T20:34:25

Had the same thought but then wondered if the damage would cause vibration which would then lead to other issues.

christiangenco · 2024-01-25T20:34:58

I'm pretty sure none of my terrestrial drones have lasted more than a few dozen flights—72 across the solar system is impressive engineering!

AlbertCory · 2024-01-25T22:33:39

The helicopter is one of the coolest things NASA's ever done. 72 flights. Wow. Great job, folks.

TheCoreh · 2024-01-26T06:20:06

I wonder why they only sent one? Why couldn't they send 3-5 identical helicopters so they still had a few more to spare?

(The hover weights ~1000kg, the helicopter ~1kg)

h2odragon · 2024-01-25T20:47:49

Great run.

They're gonna have trouble justifying buying the extended warranty next time.

lovemenot · 2024-01-26T05:33:50

Ingenuity? Pah!

Couldn't it MacGyver a fix for the damaged blade, using materials at hand?

Seriously though, great job you plucky little 'copter.

bigbillheck · 2024-01-25T20:19:24

Designed for five, lasted 72, not too shabby.

rtkwe · 2024-01-25T21:02:52

Extraplanetary missions are almost always many times longer than initially designed because the initial mission is largely limited by the budget which includes the price of the people here on Earth and the time available on the Deep Space Network. Building a rover robust enough to last way longer than the basic mission is a blip in the budget when you include that and the launch costs so they keep being run until they're surpassed by another mission, they run out of some consumable (on Curiosity for example there's a limited number of times they can run some of the internal equipment), or they're out of new things to find to justify the cost of going on.

dotnet00 · 2024-01-25T22:04:57

With the rovers its pretty much a given that they'll out last the initially stated 90 day mission. They're much more expensive and carefully crafted for the task.

Ingenuity is special because it's commercial off-the-shelf parts put together on a low-ish budget. It (as well as various other aspects of Perseverance) has shown that Mars can be tolerable for off the shelf hardware, rather than needing bespoke million dollar projects for everything.

subterrane · 2024-01-25T20:36:20

I dunno, feels like they overshot it. They should talk to the engineers that made my washing machine. That thing was designed to outlast the warranty and, I'll be damned, they nailed it.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA · 2024-01-25T23:21:04

Only so much genius to go around.

linsomniac · 2024-01-26T01:26:37

That achievement is spectacular! Based on my experience flying drones, 72 flights is about 72 flights more than I can do without damaging the blades....

ragebol · 2024-01-25T21:19:04

So, it still landed, upright no less, with a piece of the rotor blade missing? I'd guess that when a piece of rotor comes off during flight, the imbalance would make landing impossible. Very curious to what happened, but probably we'll never know exactly.

tempestn · 2024-01-25T21:25:16

My guess would be that the rotor struck the ground during landing.

Kerb_ · 2024-01-25T21:44:00

If I'm interpreting the picture correctly, it does look like there is a gouge on the ground in the pic showing the shadow

somat · 2024-01-26T03:48:26

Also, there are some very interesting shiny blue rocks in that photo. I assume scrapped by the rotor. I would be very interested in a xenogeology article on this.

tempestn · 2024-01-26T06:34:57

Maybe those are pieces of rotor? I know the rotors look white in the other picture, but maybe the broken surface is different and/or they look bluish reflecting light in that picture.

dtgriscom · 2024-01-26T01:12:58

Landing is easy. Landing without causing further damage, though...

arthurcolle · 2024-01-25T21:29:34

How did the prop tip get damaged like that? Did it crash into something?

prismic · 2024-01-26T00:28:25

They mentioned during the media briefing that the terrain they were flying in were featureless, which is extremely challenging for it to determine where it's at, and thus it's possible that it misidentified some aspect of the terrain and caused this. Unfortunately because communication was lost when it landed, the flight data was lost, so we will never know for sure what happened.

Dylan16807 · 2024-01-26T03:43:47

It doesn't save flight data until it receives confirmation of download?

foobarbecue · 2024-01-26T03:58:50

During flight, high-rate flight data is written to volatile RAM, and 1HZ data is telemetered to Perseverance. The high-rate data is not written to disk until landing, because writing to disk is slow and CPU-intensive. There was a brownout during or just before landing, and sadly that meant the high-rate telemetry data was lost because it was never written to disk.

And by "disk" I mean non-volatile flash memory.

Dylan16807 · 2024-01-26T04:00:54

Okay, so we do have a subset of the flight data.

Thanks for the info.

foobarbecue · 2024-01-26T04:04:01

Yes, and the team is vigorously studying the 1HZ data leading up to the brownout.

junon · 2024-01-25T22:31:58

Most likely.

> Communication with Ingenuity was lost again at the end of the 72nd flight on January 18, 2024. JPL regained contact on January 20.

Not an expert here but I assume the loss of contact was caused by some crash or something.

LASR · 2024-01-25T20:40:29

For some reason, this kind of news always makes me sad. Like emotionally.

Probably because of this https://xkcd.com/695/

NASA has done an effective job at connecting with regular people. Goes to show, how even something as small as naming something differently makes a big shift in the mindset.

Buttons840 · 2024-01-25T20:46:45

I sometimes personify things too--impossible to throw away old stuffed animals. I just tell myself these objects fulfilled their purpose, and that makes them happy.

Leszek · 2024-01-25T20:57:23

I've always preferred this alternative rewrite: https://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/spirit_rewrite_unknown_author.png

kaycebasques · 2024-01-26T03:26:39

Thank you, that's much more aligned with the spirit of a rover that I imagine

zilti · 2024-01-26T08:38:52

That xkcd gets me every time.

purpleblue · 2024-01-25T20:21:05

Can they just do one more #YOLO flight at a high speed and high altitude as possible and see what happens? Seems more useful and fun than just leaving it to rot.

rtkwe · 2024-01-25T20:56:54

It won't make it off the ground. Ingenuity has to spin it's rotors about 10 times faster than it does here on Earth. With that big of a chunk missing there's no way it can fly it'd tear itself to pieces during the spin up.

JumpCrisscross · 2024-01-25T20:59:26

> more useful and fun than just leaving it to rot

Ginny has an independent solar panel/battery set-up. Perhaps it could be rigged as a lone stationary sensor?

skykooler · 2024-01-26T05:10:34

It can't communicate over long distances, so it wouldn't be able to communicate with Earth after Perseverance drives out of range.

tempestn · 2024-01-25T21:32:11

I wonder if it could even use its rotors to periodically blow away dust on the panels?

HPsquared · 2024-01-25T20:23:27

Probably don't want any flying debris hitting the rover.

LeifCarrotson · 2024-01-25T20:55:47

It's nearly a kilometer from the rover, should be fine.

But I agree that it's better to leave it, download the remaining images and data from memory, maybe leave the software running as an experiment in non-rad-hardened computers on the surface, and eventually put it in a museum, than risk it crashing in spectacular fashion.

lorstic · 2024-01-25T21:14:04

The tips of the rotors approach the speed of sound. Around Mach 0.95.

I'm sure someone can do the math on the maximum debris field, but I think it'll be larger than you're thinking.

dgacmu · 2024-01-26T00:00:06

Agreed: Our earth-based intuition is probably pretty off when the atmosphere creates 1% as much friction as it does here.

blisterpeanuts · 2024-01-25T20:56:29

From the article:

  The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield.

I wonder if the rover couldn't proceed to the location of the helicopter and get some high res images for diagnostic purposes. I'm sure they considered that option so maybe the rover's schedule is just too busy to accommodate such a mission.

Anyway, R.I.P. Ingenuity and kudos to Nasa for another excellent piece of tech that lasted on another planet for years longer than originally planned.

zokier · 2024-01-25T22:05:20

Rover time and mission resources are definitely limited and a concern, but apparently the location of the copter is also really inconvenient to access. Its sitting down in a valley middle of big sand ripple field. So its not clear if the rover could reach there even if they wanted to.

That being said, not all hope is lost. While closeups are unlikely, the rover is driving in that general direction so there is (very slight) possibility to catch the copter in some lucky drive-by pic from a distance.

laverya · 2024-01-25T21:36:12

Also the rover is really, really slow - a few hundred meters on a good day.

MicolashKyoka · 2024-01-25T21:40:21

amazing work by the team at nasa.

we'll get there and repair it so it does fly again in a few years :')

seatac76 · 2024-01-25T21:09:24

Sad to hear but kudos for an absolute feat of engineering.

mrandish · 2024-01-25T23:51:59

That was an amazing run. Well done Genny!

pengaru · 2024-01-26T02:56:29

So how long before we send a swarm of 100s of these to image the entire planet up close and personal?

ThrowawayTestr · 2024-01-26T00:30:37

Greatly exceeded expectations. This little heli has earned its place in space history.

schiffern · 2024-01-25T22:27:20

In other news, some reliability engineer at NASA somewhere is very happy to have a new data point.

"Oh, so that's where....."

Whatarethese · 2024-01-25T20:30:16

Wasn't it only supposed to fly just a few time but it blew that number out of the water. Great job NASA engineers!

Sindisil · 2024-01-26T02:48:36

Five flights was the original mission plan.

_Algernon_ · 2024-01-25T20:33:29

Rest in Peace little dude

https://xkcd.com/695/

o11c · 2024-01-25T20:43:55

And of course the happy version:

http://xkcdsw.com/3968

brabel · 2024-01-25T20:57:44

Thank you so much. The sad version was, somehow, actually upsetting.

bsder · 2024-01-25T22:02:18

"Hotel" by Boichi:

https://imgur.com/a/DdLCU

bredren · 2024-01-25T21:54:52

Was the singular focus on the Wright Brothers' contributions to flight and ingenuity a fair one?

I had thought there was some shift in the Wright Brothers' attribution to flight in general.

It seemed like better recognition of the contributions by Samuel Langley and Glenn Curtiss' to flight technology were along with acknowledgement of the WB's own efforts to boost their legacy might have checked a decision to keep pouring on the WB-were-the-ones narrative.

cybrox · 2024-01-25T23:16:19

It was not about the contribution but about the moment.

The Wright brothers achieved the first powered flight on earth and Ingenuity achieved the first powered flight on another planet.

I think people are well aware that it's neither the Wright brothers nor ingenuity as a singular entity that did what ultimately concluded in that achievement but rather the scientific effort of humanity as a whole.

bredren · 2024-01-26T04:40:56

I disagree, if anything, the Wright brothers’ documented first powered flight and desperate effort to control the technology and historical narrative have caused other contributors to continue to go unrecognized in important mainstream media like this.

If it was the scientific effort of humanity as a whole, then it seems like the director would have simply compared it to the profound effort toward manned flight.

After all, we have Langley Air Force Base and NASA’s own Langley Research Center.

vpribish · 2024-01-25T23:13:19

Where did they talk about the Wrights? This on the wrong article?

cybrox · 2024-01-25T23:17:31

It's part of the video of Bill Nelsons speech that's embedded in the article.

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