First Flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Video (of the video from Perseverance): https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1384099167832735748 (Better version from the livestream in child comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861334)
My understanding is that video requires power to transcode and compress, and power is a scarce resource.
This is especially true on ingenuity, which is powered by six 18650 batteries. And most of that power is dumped into just keeping it warm enough to function, not into actually flying.
https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...
I am not expecting much from Ingenuity but I would be very disappointed if we didn’t see any video from Perseverance.
I know doing video requires a lot of power, but I really feel it is justified for something like this. It would become a historic video.
Exciting to see so many young faces and women on the team.
Also, I read up on the project lead MiMi Aung [1] - she's very insipring. I remember seeing her interview at the time when the rover was about to land, so much anticipation and hope. Now, so much excitement is truly uplifting.
Congrats!
Hopefully that last one sticks when commercial service begins.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mars-helicopter-in...
How do other engineers here on HN feel about it?
Moreover such complex missions can go either way, I think it is perhaps better to be even-tempered and business like about it.
Today? I'd be running around like an excited child, given half a chance. Probably hugging people I know are comfortable with it. I recognized I really do like that energy, and I only live once.
Not saying people who prefer a more restrained celebration are not valid in their preference! Everyone is a little different, and that is a good thing. At my workplace we like to have multiple ways to celebrate a milestone, because it's important that everyone can participate if they want. For example, we might have a team lunch/party (pre covid) for folks who like that, but also, say, personalized notes sent out, or office posters made of the achievement with participants' signatures on it (optional), and companywide announcements (again, representation optional).
For the record the only movie that routinely tears me up is Apollo 13. Specifically, when they land, and the people in Mission Control are shown. Some of those people have a lifelong bond because of that event, I'm sure. That's important to me.
That's OK. I not only don't celebrate that way, it'd make me uncomfortable even for a peer I like to hug me out of excitement. It's not what I want but it's what other people want and it seems to be the norm.
You may end up learning that this may hold you back professionally at some point unless you can stay in a role that doesn't value social signaling, as these behaviors are basically expected, and not performing them will get you excluded, unless you find a way to surround yourself with people who have shared views on this sort of thing, which is really hard to find out because it's implied.
At least that's what I've been thinking this past year of isolation where I have been very happy to not feel obliged to do the social things everyone else so desperately wants to go out and do together.
I'm on the lookout for backcountry camping trips I can do once things are "back to normal" so I can continue my isolation while everyone is at restaurants and parties.
I am gonna be really irresponsible, once I got my vaccine shot.
"We don't know from history what Wilbur and Orville did after their first successful flight, but I imagine the two brothers hugged each other. Well, you know I'm hugging you virtually. And, you guys who haven't been with me for 4, 5, 6 years...if it weren't for COVID-19 you guys don't have a chance of me (I think she was saying they wouldn't be able to stop her from hugging them) but I cannot give you a hug, so this is all I can do. I'm giving you the hugs."
Actually, that's pretty unlikely. It was a very different time. A display like that would have been considered unseemly. Also, neither Wilbur nor Orville were known for being particularly emotional or affectionate. Neither brother ever married.
All these brilliant minds working for so long and accomplishing so much... Just for a clap and cheer, yet tommorow they have to do it all again in the rat race. Yet cryptokings are basking in glory for a lifetime.
The title text hit me a little harder than I was expecting:
> I've never been that big of a hug person, but it turns out I'm not quite this small of a hug person either.
The graph has a rough average of about 20 distinct people per year. Maybe I'm the odd one out here, but that seems quite high.
The video feed had a "university team" feel to it that was sort of unexpected and nice :)
I was surprised to see the tack sharp shadow on the image from the downwards facing navigation camera. My thinking was that the rotors needed to spin way faster on this drone than on a drone on earth, because of how thin the atmosphere is on mars. But the sharpness seems to indicate that the rotor speed is perhaps all that different! Or perhaps the whole thing is just so light that there is not so much mass to lift up?
I wonderful aircraft if it is a net gain or loss — Mars vs. Earth.
Here it says "Enterprise".
Only negative thing I can think of is that I really hope the Perseverance rover has better video onboard just not transmitted yet. Maybe they will release it during the press conference later today. The one they showed was a little clipped. It had spin up. then it sort of cuts to the mid flight and then cuts to the spin down... all the takeoff and touchdown excitement is totally missing from the video they showed. If I didn't know as much as I do about how image telemetry is handled... I'd actually have thought it was broken, thats how abrupt the transition is in the video.
I hope the landing was smooth and we can look forward to lots of aerial photos from Ingenuity.
I figured the team had decided to uplink only the most essential frames for this test flight (spin up, hover, and spin down) and send the low-res preview versions of them back in order to get the data back as fast as possible before a much slower upload of the full mastcam higher resolution video frames.
Whats extra amazing here is this is High Definition (possibly even in 3D) video sent to us from a nuclear powered rover on Mars!
Indeed.
Something transformational for me seeing this group of super young people achieve so much. Inspiring and hopeful and more :)
Second that about looked older... Maybe it was the super8 video quality
Kind of sad, but valid point. Future historians seeing people wearing masks might think those kids were in the situation room for some biological attack apocalypse
There's no mechanism to reattach ingenuity to the rover.
Let that sink in.
7.3+4.48+5.998 > 13.8
But instead of trying to prevent disaster, most of the world's ingenuity is squandered on trying to squeeze another buck out of the world.
I wish there was more about what it did after it dropped its load. Did it just fly until fuel ran out? Or fly for a minute and shut off? I think they did say it crashed, which was probably unnecessary, considering how far away it got. It probably could have set down neatly 100 ft away.
I'm sure there was some dust thrown up in the air, but probably not enough to be seen against the background.
I recently wrote a short piece about Ingenuity’s COTS hardware, its open source software, and its radiation mitigation techniques: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2021-02-24-Issue-105/#ingen...
I am curious what the importance of this is. What overall goal is this research contributing to? Is a mars landing system using "helicopter" style powered flight system the ultimate goal?
(Side note: balloons have actually been used on Venus already, on the Vega missions!)
The problem of course is that while it's easy to use a gas that's less dense than Mars' atmosphere, it can't be very much less dense because you're starting from a very low density. So, you'd need a huge volume in order to lift anything substantial.
edit: looks like a sibling comment said the same thing first..
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/science/nasa-mars-helicop...
It's almost like NASA doesn't realize many people watch these videos.
I like watching behind the sceen stuff, but I also want NASA to come off in the best light.
The video had a production value of a subpar PBS late night video.
NASA has a duty to promote the agency too. There's a PR value to everything, especially when using public money.
(I want to give NASA more funds some days. Other days, I would rather give it to Musk. I'm not sure anymore who will use the money better.)
You can make the same whataboutist argument for why we shouldn't even be on Mars.
And how much longer will they have to stay on it?
These either age discrimination or people on that team use really good moisturizers.
I kid.
Kudos to the team for launching a flying rover on Mars!