grmcdorman
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2007
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Third flight completed (announced moments ago as I type on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere)
In the helicopter's new operational phase, it will fly up to a kilometre ahead of the rover, scouting for promising geological features and exploring areas that Perseverance cannot reach.
It will also make digital elevation maps, helping scientists to better understand the terrain.
The hope is this will demonstrate how aerial mobility could help future missions.
Some footage from Ingenuity's 5th flight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgQxUcjL4vM
It has moved to a new location.
Some footage from Ingenuity's 5th flight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgQxUcjL4vM
It has moved to a new location.
A technical problem cropped up in Ingenuity's sixth flight. The helicopter survived the flight, but it's a bit concerning:
Surviving an In-Flight Anomaly: What Happened on Ingenuity’s Sixth Flight (Mission blog)
Turns out those humans actually can contribute to exploration.. I.e picking up rocks.
I know you are kidding here, but seriously, that is the difference between sending a machine to do the job, and sending humans. In the time it has taken the machine to accomplish the relatively simple task of taking a small core sample, a human could have collected a truck load of them.
The dust storm couldn't keep NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity grounded forever.
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity aced a 100-second sortie on Tuesday (Feb. 8), its 19th Red Planet flight overall but its first since Dec. 15.
The flight had originally been targeted for Jan. 5. But on New Year's Day, a big dust storm kicked up near the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, which Ingenuity and its robotic partner, NASA's Perseverance rover, have been exploring since February 2021.
The Ingenuity team decided to stand down until the dust storm passed, making Ingenuity the first aircraft ever to have a flight delayed by inclement weather on another planet.
Ingenuity has photographed Perseverence's parachute and backshell, which is just so damn cool.
That is cool.
What is even more cool is that Ingenuity was planned to make a maximum of five flights within 30 Sols, if everything went well.....
423 Sols since Perseverance landed, and this was Ingenuity's 27th flight!
Ingenuity has photographed Perseverence's parachute and backshell, which is just so damn cool.
Toss-up between Ingenuity and JWST in my opinion.The over-performance of Ingenuity is insane. It's my new favorite space craft.
A camera on NASA’s Perseverance rover captured an eclipse of the sun by Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons. Video by NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI.
Toss-up between Ingenuity and JWST in my opinion.
Ingenuity has photographed Perseverence's parachute and backshell, which is just so damn cool.
Is that a cat in the lower left of that photo?
Is that a cat in the lower left of that photo?
Organic molecules in Wildcat Ridge
A rock named Wildcat Ridge, located in an ancient river delta region of Jezero Crater, was one of the stars of the show. Percy successfully collected two samples from the mudstone rock. Wildcat Ridge is particularly exciting because the organic molecules (called aromatics) found in it are considered a potential biosignature, which NASA describes as a substance or structure that could be evidence of past life but may also have been produced without the presence of life.
Sample drop
Percy currently has 12 rock samples on board, including the Wildcat Ridge pieces and samples from another sedimentary delta rock called Skinner Ridge. It also collected igneous rock samples earlier in the mission that point to the impact of long-ago volcanic action in the crater.
NASA is so happy with the diversity of samples collected that it's looking into dropping some of the filled tubes off on the surface soon in preparation for the future Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign. MSR is an ambitious plan to send a lander to Mars, pick up Percy's samples, rocket them off the surface and bring them back to Earth for close study. The mission is under development. If all goes as planned, those rocks could be here by 2033.
Ingenuity is still going. Over 50 flights. Highest altitude 18m.
In view of this, the 2028 lander has been redesigned to include 2 helicopters.
They're going to need a control tower down there.
NASAIngenuity Mars Helicopter has ended its mission at the Red Planet after surpassing expectations and making dozens more flights than planned. While the helicopter remains upright and in communication with ground controllers, imagery of its Jan. 18 flight sent to Earth this week indicates one or more of its rotor blades sustained damage during landing and it is no longer capable of flight.
We don't even need to land people on Mars. If we put people in orbit around Mars, they could better control robots that could probably explore more of Mars in a few days than all of the previous probes and rovers have explored.
People, and air, and food, and safety systems, and radiation shielding, and exercise equipment, and whatever a human might need, to not go insane after a year or two.... All that payload tonnage could give you a lot of robots and no risk at all to human life.
And the robots will keep getting better and better.
The communication lag is less than ideal.
Humans in orbit, robots on the gound seems best to me. Provided some sort of rotating habitat simuating gravity is viable.