NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity touches down on the Red Planet | Hacker News Reader

NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity touches down on the Red Planet

space.com

75 pointsdgudkov12 comments

NASA needs to do way more cool stuff like this. Drilling rocks and analyzing them is very useful for science but flying a drone is what gets people excited and inspired. I can’t wait for the drone they want to fly on Titan one day or a submarine diving on Europa. I think projects like this are also driving technology forward.

The most fascinating part is that this fragile looking drone, looks in perfect shape after such a rough ride through out atmosphere and then an other rough bump entering the mars atmosphere.

A drone in a box, getting shipped from China to my place ends up looking all beaten up.

There are maybe 6 more zeroes on the cost for this drone.

That buys a lot of hardening.

I think that they used explosions to release NASA's helicopter, too. Let's see if it flies now.

Really loving this project. Still wondering though how you can spend $85 million developing a 1.8kg drone helicopter? And how do you actually come up with the estimate to get the budget approved? Yes I understand all the challenges of delivery to a distant planet, the thin atmosphere and lower gravity and extreme temperatures, but wow.

Veritasium has a great video on the helicopter. Early on in the video they explain that Mars’ atmosphere is equivalent in density to Earth’s atmosphere at 100,000 feet, and the record altitude for helicopters on earth is 40,000 feet. https://youtu.be/GhsZUZmJvaM

Since the rover has a microphone I wonder how through the thin air the helicopter will sound?

They actually have a clip of the sound in the video, and if I remember correctly that sound was recorded in the 1% atmosphere chamber, so should sound similar to how it would sound on Mars.

Direct link to footage of test flight with audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM&t=343s

I was about to link his video as well. It's really amazing how the ubiquity of all this technology makes people not realize how friggin hard the problems JPL faces are.

The friggin rover comes down off a SKYHOOK. Off a rocket platform. And it weighs almost as much as a compact car. CMON.

Testing. Gotta use a giant vacuum chamber to test to see if it will fly. Gotta test to make sure the release mechanism that drops it works perfectly no matter what happens to the system. Gotta make sure it can’t get itself stuck and damage the parent robot. Gotta make sure every last detail is perfect cause you only get one chance and there’s no repair crews.

Related discussion from a few hours ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688153

Reply on news.ycombinator.com