NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range | Hacker News Reader

NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range

washingtonpost.com

74 pointsdctoedt27 comments

I still find it perplexing that one can fly a helicopter, or anything really, in such a thin atmosphere.

Especially considering one needs power which is not magical. In X-plane one can equip the plane with magical jets, but in real life?

It is unintuitive. There's a video [1] demonstrating just how difficult it is to get moving air to do any work when you have as little air to work with as you would on Mars.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYe3sIaNHVs ("How Strong is The Wind on Mars?" by Cody'sLab)

Totally agree. It's obviously a high risk portion of the mission but I'm glad someone had the guts to propose it.

Derek from Veritasium did a nice little story on it last summer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM

What's the utility of doing this besides being cool? It is very cool, but given the weight restrictions, I'm not sure there's any clear use case for this tech besides camera drones. The article implies the aerial pictures are a secondary goal.

This particular mission is a technology proving mission, future missions will use it for forward scouting type stuff, use the copter to find best courses forward, heavier ground probe with all the experiments can take a path with the advantage of foresight. At least that's my understanding.

Rovers are unfortunately very slow, meaning they cannot cover much area, and cannot measure from very many areas simultaneously. Helicopters fill that gap. I think this paper might cover some of the motivation: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2018-0023

"There's something neat we'd like to look at, but we can't get the rover up there" seems like a likely answer.

It's a technology demonstration.

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/

There is a future mission planned to Titan called Dragonfly, it will send a rotorcraft to the surface.

Perhaps they can use the data from this mars copter to improve the odds of success with Dragonfly.

The title implies they're behind schedule and need to rush more than expect. Is that the case, or is it simply stating there's a hard deadline by natural forces?

I'm not on the team, but this is the first I've heard of any unexpected or abnormal rush. Schedules are always a little tight, especially with a pandemic on.

The rover is basically a brand new self-driving tank with a helicopter launcher and a robotic arm with a swiss-army-science tool and a laser cannon. That's a lot of stuff to get working properly and packed into a rocket. Oh, it has to land like the Falcon 9 as well, except hovering and lowering itself on a tether, like the Air Cav for Mars.

> Oh, it has to land like the Falcon 9 as well, except hovering and lowering itself on a tether, like the Air Cav for Mars.

Here's a video that blows my mind every time I watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2I8AoB1xgU

Such a complicated landing sequence, and needs to work correctly the first time, all autonomously. And it worked!

They don't call them flagship missions for no reason

Because Mars and Earth takes different amounts of time to complete an orbit around the Sun, launching at the right point in time is absolutely essential to ensure that your transfer orbit takes you to the distance of Mars' orbit at the exact point in time that Mars will happen to be there. You can mess around with your transfer orbit parameters to give you a bit of leeway, but ultimately limits on available delta V and on maximum relative velocity on encounter limit the window of time that you have to launch your mission. See https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov.

They have until mid August to launch the mission[0]. If not, the additional cost of keeping personnel employed and hardware maintained for the next 2 years or so while waiting for Earth and Mars to return to the same relative positions can easily cost $150m, if the InSight mission delay is any guide. [1]

[0] https://spacenews.com/mars-2020-launch-slips-three-days/ [1] https://spacenews.com/insight-delay-adds-150-million-to-miss...

Wouldn’t the people mainly work on other projects? Do NASA utilise a lot of consultants or are they mainly permanent employees?

Well, yes, NASA does rely a lot on external contractors due to the budgetary flexibility it entails. While there is some cross-communication between teams, it's generally limited by the extreme degree of specialisation needed. Also, as a general rule almost all of the hardware for any given mission is custom built for that mission, so the necessary knowhow to operate it is both unique and irreplaceable.

That said, some of the extra cost is due to scope creep, or due to changes in launch vehicle availability requiring the mission to be redesigned.

NASA rushing a Mars mission. What could possibly go wrong?

Total Destruction of the universe?

As long as it does not involve astronauts, rushing the mission and risking Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly is fine I guess.

Is this one of those YOLO moments?

If they're anything like college me starting a paper the night before it's due, it'll all go flawlessly.

They should be rushing far more given the last 5 decades of progress.

Yes. Why did I get a flashback to the rushed Challenger mission disaster. If they'd waited till the weather was more suitable, it wouldn't have happened.

I'm so glad I lost that "You can't fly a helicopter in Mars atmosphere" bet.

You haven’t lost it yet...

Well, they've tested it in mars equivalent atmosphere and gravity (through the clever use of pulleys) soooo, hasn't he? he didn't bet you couldn't fly a helicopter on /mars/, just it's atmosphere.

I think it's fairly well established you can. The problem is about whether we will.

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