Mars helicopter “Ingenuity” has been dropped to the surface | Hacker News Reader

Mars helicopter “Ingenuity” has been dropped to the surface

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Meet the Martians: https://mars.nasa.gov/people/?category=mars2020

Great writeup here on how they built this self flying helicopter and the tech onboard.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/aerospace/robotic-explor...

This video was pretty good too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM

"And the nights were very cold" -- Burroughs, "A Princess of Mars".

Wow, I didn’t think the rover would have moved as much as it did already. Expected to see months of checkups, nice to see them progressing fast. Is there an approximate schedule of the first flight?

Current target seems to be "no earlier than April 11"

Wait I must have been living under a rock, are they going to fly a helicopter on Mars??! How will they control it? Latency issues and all.

It's a drone helicopter, it can fly itself.

You can find its Wikipedia article at [0]. The answer is that it is (semi-)autonomous! [1] I think it is going to get directions where to go and will do the rest itself. Its processor is not hardened against radiation which most likely will make it rather short-lived but thereby they could use a much more powerful processor than otherwise possible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)

[1] It has to be as even under ideal conditions, Mars and Earth are never closer than ~55 million kilometers. This means the minimum roundtrip time is about six minutes at the speed of light.

These photos never get boring. Truly fascinating piece of engineering & achievement. What’s the best way to stay up to date on every (photo) update of this mission?

Follow the rover itself on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/NASAPersevere

...is there a non-twitter version? (I loathe whoever decided this if it's the only place for it)

The public mission page is at https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

If you just hate Twitter's website only because of its bloat and slowness, you can use alternative frontends like https://nitter.net

At the moment, nitter.net is rate-limited but you can use nitter.eu instead for example:

https://nitter.eu/NASAPersevere

I read 'Mars helicopter “Money” has been dropped to the surface'.

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