Mars helicopter Ingenuity soars higher than ever on 35th Red Planet flight | Hacker News Reader

Mars helicopter Ingenuity soars higher than ever on 35th Red Planet flight

space.com

132 pointstaubek18 comments

Shameless plug: I compiled a list of research materials on Ingenuity control and navigation [1]. Someone might find it useful.

[1] https://kklisura.com/2022/04/11/nasas-mars-helicopter-ingenu...

Nice collection :) How do you find all of those articles?

I came here hoping to find this. Thank you

There is a very nice map of the mission.

https://mars.nasa.gov/maps/location/?mission=M20

If you go to layers you can turn on the helicopter flight path.

The only thing I was missing was a distance tool.

But while I was looking for that I did find two hidden tools which sort of work for distances.

drag the scale marker in the bottom left corner to get a rectangle widget you can place on the map.

click on the lat/log in the lower right side to cycle to easting/northing and relative east/north.

I never thought about it before but on mars a latitude/longitude(at the equator) is about 37 miles(60 km) vs roughly 70 miles(112 km) on earth.

This article is really nice but has absolutely not a single link back to the NASA website, so, to save you a search:

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

The third paragraph has a link to the flight log on that page: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Flight-Log

If it were to fall from a height of 14m on Mars, it would reach a speed of 36km/h when hitting the ground after 2.74 seconds of free fall (let's ignore the thin Mars atmosphere). Gravity is 3.7m/s/s.

On Earth after falling from 14m (again, ignoring the atmosphere) you reach 59.6km/h on impact after a mere 1.69 seconds.

On the Moon it reaches 24.3km/h after 4.2 seconds. Gravity is 1.6m/s/s.

> Ingenuity covered about 49 feet (15 m) of horizontal distance on Saturday's flight, which lasted 52 seconds. The helicopter has now traveled a total of 24,302 feet (7,407 m) and stayed aloft for 59.9 minutes on its 35 Mars sorties, according to the mission flight log

Makes so happy to see such impressive numbers coming from what at the time was little more than especulative exploration

One of the people that worked on the helicopter works out at my gym. He's a cool bean.

One issue that plagued the mars rovers so far is the buildup of dust on the solar panels. Could the helicopter help by flying over the rover, thus blowing away the dust?

Perseverance (the rover) has its own "Gaseous Dust Removal Tool (GDRT)" that puffs compressed nitrogen to remove dust from samples before analyzing them, not sure if it can turn that back around on its own panels though...

Perseverance does not use solar power. Instead it has a generator using the slow decay of radioactive material. The solar panel problem was more with earlier rovers

Well, that's convenient.

It looks like maybe Ingenuity's panel could use a little blast of nitrogen though:

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_f...

I unsarcastically love the super-serious names military/space folks come up with for mundane things like a dust blower

Nope. They're not risking Ingenuity (a tech demo that works very well) crashing into Perseverance. Also: no need, Perseverance doesn't have solar panels but an Radioactive Thermal Generator.

Also, the dust is static

The dust can also be magnetic. Ingenuity has a color calibration plate [1] on top and it's protected from dust by a ring of magnets. Here [2] it is in situ on sol 2 on Mars. Clearly visible are the magnetic patterns made by the layer of dust that was kicked up at landing.

[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25433/mastcam-zs-calibration...

[2] https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ZLF_000...

Ok sorry for the noob question. I guessed no, just because of the risks, but now I see there is no point trying.

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