NASA’s Mars Helicopter Spots Gear That Helped Perseverance Rover Land | Hacker News Reader

NASA’s Mars Helicopter Spots Gear That Helped Perseverance Rover Land

jpl.nasa.gov

66 pointsrevorad19 comments

Everytime I read the words "Mars Helicopter" I get giddy. Especially the fact that this is running on close to COTS cellphone hardware, it just makes me so happy for the future of space exploration.

Now to design a helicopter to do the same thing on Venus and Mercury!

Mercury doesn't have atmosphere

I'm not sure you'd use a helicopter on Venus, certainly not at ground level. Maybe an airship that can survive suphuric acid in the upper atmosphere where it's a little more forgiving (albeit with less hope on finding organic phosphene).

We've got Dragonfly to look forward to though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(spacecraft)

You could probably make a more conventional aircraft with a high lift wing concept that could spend most of its time gliding above the clouds. And a small electric motor to provide thrust when needed. But it would mostly ride currents and glide. Given how thick the atmosphere is on Venus, you could probably get very high lift figures.

The most likely scenario based on all the reports I've read is a variable altitude balloon (similar to Google Loon).

The second most likely is a hybrid airship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_airship

My friend, I hope I have the pleasure of showing you, for the first time, the nuclear powered autonomous helicopter going to Titan:

https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/

And if it's not the first time, then I hope we can both enjoy remembering this again!

The hardware won't be COTS. Rarely is anything COTS that's not a tech demo / high risk experiment. I'm guessing follow-on Mars copters have a 50% chance of being COTS, but that's trending upward as Ing. lives and does good work on Mars.

> I'm guessing follow-on Mars copters have a 50% chance of being COTS

It's surprising considering that Mars radioactivity is 12 times that of Earth, and occasionally 50 times, because it doesn't have a magnetosphere. How are they hardened against cosmic radiation?

Well, it wouldn't be any fun if I told you that.

So, I'll let the engineers tell you: https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/46229/CL%2317...

COTS components abound!

In short:

"[The Snapdragon] processor implements visual navigation via a velocity estimate derived from features tracked in the VGA camera, filter propagation for use in flight control, data management, command processing, telemetry generation, and radio communication. The SnapdragonTM processor is connected to two flight-control (FC) Microcontroller Units (MCU) via a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART). These MCU processor units operate redundantly, receiving and processing identical sensor data to perform the flight-control functions necessary to keep the vehicle flying in the air."

They also use Zigbee radios to communicate with the rover.

I can't wait to see a fleet of these on Mars, surveying the area for possible landing and mining etc. We've had MRO but the detail these would provide would be hard to beat.

I can't help but notice that we are creating a mess on Mars.

We can clean it up easily if and when we get there, unlike Earth.

We won’t. We’ll just create even more mess.

Ah so you've played "Surviving Mars"

I've thought a lot about that, but on the moon. When/if we get to mars, and someone drives their rover from one place to another. The wheel tracks in the dirt can, eventually, be erased by the winds of Mars.

On the moon, there is no such refresher. In the year 12022, there will be up to 10,000 years of rover tracks covering the surface of the moon. I just wonder what will become of the Apollo 11 landing site. I can imagine it in a bubble in the middle of some mall on the surface of the moon.

They would eventualy get eroded by solar winds (that's why there are eroded craters that we can date) and the like but it'd take a while!

Messes, like everything else, are relative. If a thing crashes into Mars, and nothing around cares, how can it be a mess?

Cheer up, until humans arrive there, Mars is a planet populated by robots, and they don't make big messes. Even the first colonies will have to be resource-efficient if they want to prosper, hopefully diverging from our current wasteful mentality.

Perseverence and Ingenuity just keep on giving, I love it.

I have often wondered if you could get more benefit from sending several similar rovers to the same place so they could cooperate and do more, but this mixed mode approach seems better.

"... 10 aerial color images taken April 19 during Ingenuity’s Flight 26" - I am more excited by the fact Ingenuity continues to operate and has so far collected unique imagery and telemetry on 26 flights!

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