Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again | Hacker News Reader

Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again

nasa.gov

515 pointsfoobarbecue201 comments

I just interned at the NASA office (at Ames) that designed large chunks of and did a lot of flight planning / analysis for Ingenuity. It had some really awesome people behind it and its success inspired a number of new Mars rotorcraft missions (rotorcraft will be an integral part of Mars Sample Return). Flight is going to be a huge part of future solar system exploration efforts and Ingenuity paved the way.

Isn't Mars Sample Return pretty much dead at this point?

I contributed to the helicopter design for it so I'm biased but I think it'll happen eventually even if the funding isn't approved this administration/year/decade. The already-stashed samples will be up there basically forever, and we'll probably want samples from a few different areas anyways, so it makes sense to go grab them.

Mars has weather, unlike the moon. Will the samples really still be there a decade or two from now?

The samples are meant to survive the vacuum of space but can't handle some weather? That seems unlikely.

How erosive is the vacuum of space meant to be?

You mean that place that smells of burnt metal and is full of hard radiation? Surface of Mars is definitely more hospitable.

> Overall, astronauts often compare the smell of space to "hot metal, burnt meat, burnt cakes, spent gunpowder and welding of metal," according to Steve Pearce, a biochemist and CEO of Omega Ingredients, who combed through astronaut interviews to help him craft a NASA-commissioned scent: https://www.livescience.com/space/what-does-space-smell-like

Guess I'm one of today's 10,000.

They made a perfume of it.

https://eaudespace.com/

Wouldn't it be the smell of space suits and space stations, rather than space itself? I don't think astronauts have tried to breath the few particles in the vacuum.

The smell is apparent when one doffs their suit after a spacewalk.

Not less erosive though.

Mars' famous dust storms aren't so good at causing damage, because the air's really, really thin, so they can't pick up heavy particles even with high wind speeds. A serious problem if you need to keep grit out of fine machinery or electronics, not so much if you're worried about erosion (I mean, yeah, eventually it'd be a problem, but it's slow-motion compared to the erosion of something exposed to sand storms on Earth)

I guess it could eventually get buried, but I'd expect that to also be a slow process on most parts of the planet, for similar reasons. The only forces seriously driving weathering on the planet are radiation and wind—the radiation's pretty bad but not a problem for metal + some rocks that were already on the surface, at least over a span of a couple decades, and the wind just can't deliver much force because the atmosphere's so very thin (that's also why it's fairly difficult to fly on Mars).

As a fun anecdote this is one of the very few things that was completely faked in "The Martian" - book and movie alike, which is otherwise a hard sci-fi book. I think it's quite telling when your instigator for a disaster scenario on Mars has to be faked!

Well at least intentionally faked. It turns out Martian regolith/soil is also much more moist than expected so getting water will be relatively easy, but at the time of the book this wasn't known!

To be fair, it wasn't even the only disaster scenario in the movie - but it's very difficult to come up with a realistic scenario where someone would get left behind with a livable hab.

How about a fight between members of the crew causing the mission to be cancelled, and one of the member left for dead after a violent interaction with another member who then lie about it.

> The Martian

The thin atmosphere bit is acknowledged by the author, you can watch his talk here around 32:35:

    I just want to be as accurate as I possibly could.  There are a few places that are inaccurate.  The biggest place that's inaccurate is right at the beginning.  Don't tell anybody, but if you're in a dust storm on Mars, you're not even going to feel it.  Mars' atmosphere is less than 1% of Earth's.  So a 150 kilometer an hour wind would feel like about 1 kilometer an hour wind does on Earth.  It wouldn't do any damage to anything.

https://youtu.be/gMfuLtjgzA8?si=8aZUEizDWuBhnaJg&t=1958

There is another clarification later at 35:34 saying the dust storm is basically like talcum powder.

Well yeah, he needed some sort of catastrophic event to set the rest of the story in motion, and a huge dust storm which forces an evacuation and then separates Mark Watney from the rest of the crew was just the thing, so he added it although he was fully aware that storms don't work that way on Mars...

I don't know anything about mars, but I've messed with windmill math. This really doesn't make sense to me.

A 150 mph wind in 1% atmosphere should be a way stronger a 1 mph wind on earth?

You know the old formula,

force = mass * velocity * velocity

But with wind and water the more velocity, the more mass you get hit with in the same amount of time, so we get to multiply by velocity again.

wind force = mass * velocity * velocity * velocity

(This formula is why people die in fast moving water.)

So a Mars 150mph wind (0.01 * 150 * 150 * 150) would have 34,000 times more force than a 1mph wind on earth. Which works out to around a 32 mph earth wind.

mass * velocity * velocity has units of energy. It's twice the kinetic energy.

> which is otherwise a hard sci-fi book

Hard sci-fi is still a story and doesn't need to nail everything. And it had other pretty "unrealistic" moments that put me more off than the storm. Foremost, how they fixed the missed orbital rendezvous, no never going to happen that way. Or that they could just revert their home flight and go once more back and back again, how much delta-v would that be, never could have had that much extra fuel at least in that world... and other minor things, but still superb story.

I thought in the martian they just looped the earth to go back, and then there was the supply rocket problem. They didn't do anything silly like just use the rocket to turn around and go straight back iirc.

I remember some nasa administrator laughing about that at a conference. "So at the end of the movie the atmosphere is so thin that he can fly through it at thousands of miles per hour without harm, but at the beginning a sandstorm at hundreds of miles per hour destroys the ship? Also the spacesuits ... no."

We are talking about 6 inch long titanium tubes. What do you imagine the weather doing to them in a few decades?

Yes, they will. The weather on Mars can't do much to metal tubes. They probably won't be buried either (the area they're in doesn't get much net deposition, you can tell from how rocky it is), but if that does happen, each sample's position and the terrain around them is very precisely mapped so it would be extremely unlikely that any get completely lost.

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9337/nasas-perseverance-rover-com...

I would expect muskonauts will make the samples redundant by then.

I'd wager yes since Mars has less extreme thermal cycles than the moon

I hope the development of the MAV will bring us closer to building launch vehicles capable of getting humans off Mars. Seems like the MAV is preloaded with fuel and pretty small but should provide some good data for future missions.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/#Ascent-Vehicle

No. It's probably better to think of the multi-mission MSR "campaign" as being reformulated to be lower cost and complexity.

Why do you say that?

It depends on sample location. After discovering patches of water ice, the planet is more interesting than ever.

> o7

I never came across this emoticon, but with what you wrote, its meaning became clear immediately. It's perfect.

Same, I thought I was terminally online but I've never seen this before.

Oh, God, these comments may be the trigger to my mid-life crisis.

I remember being a terminally online teen thinking i would never fall out of “what’s hip” bc i enjoyed being online so much at the time. I have since never once installed or used TikTok and I have no idea what’s happening I am sure

If it's any consolation, it's been around since the 90s

See it quite a lot in Twitch chat

orz

For the people who weren't aware... https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/orz

Looks like a swimmer to me... what do you see?

It's a salute. :)

The 'o' is a head and the '7' is an arm giving a salute.

Here, let me help you with that...

   O7
  /|
   Λ

That's ridiculous, nobody swims up a waterfall

(but actually, thanks for the illustration... my dad was in the military but apparently long enough ago that I entirely missed this)

Edit: oh! You used a capital O rather than a little one! That makes loads of difference... the "hand" placement in o7 is way over the forehead, while O7 (or is it 07? either way) is much closer to a proper salute! Perhaps the military culture hasn't entirely worn off after all...

It's also the wrong hand. But I think the little o looks more like a head in this case. O7 just looks like a hex code or something.

Right hand if you're standing behind him...

Ah... it makes sense. I thought it was a head being scratched.

A salute

It's a salute.

> o7

Someone saluting

It is a very common theme in Elite Dangerous, to the point that the station controller will sometimes say "Oh seven, commander" to you.

Also ubiquitous in Eve Online since about 15 years ago. Did it originate in Elite Dangerous?

No, predates broadband at least. Certainly was around on Usenet in the nineties.

This is where I was first exposed to it. I'm not surprised it's got a longer history than that, though.

Funny, I didn't see it as a salute... I thought it was a "flex".

For anyone interested in the structure of the software that ran Ingenuity (and some hardware design aspects, such as the use of commercial off-the-shelve parts), there is an awesome and critically underwatched video of Timothy Canham explaining everything:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQu9m4MG5Gc&t=7s

I always thought it was crazy that NASA uses a FPGA/microcontroller/cell phone SOC setup, which makes total sense to me, but mundane industrial things like the traffic light at an intersection needs a giant cabinet with shelves of crazy seimens controllers, it feels like such overkill in comparison, you can see them on this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udpB-en9KKM . The guy is always arguing with the commenters that its all needed for safety. I never could figure out why some company doesnt come up with a NASA-sized solution to control the worlds intersections instead.

It's not needed for safety, but for liability. The equipment is costly because it need to be certified, because every piece of equipment inside will need to be certified. Engineers in this field are averse to new technology because they are liable if something goes wrong.

Infact, NASA wouldn’t use that sort of SOC for anything critical like the rover itself. Ingenuity was always a marginal experiment with a correspondingly high appetite for risk and ability to accept budgetary compromises.

I'm curious what do they use then? Seems like using an FPGA for sensor gathering and some guidance loops with microcontroller logic control is sensible. I've run into scenarios where just the sensior gathering/IO can take up a significant portion of the time slice of the microcontroller.

Sure, it was a test platform, to prove that they can use a less RAD hardened design by using the more novel approach. I'd imagine future rovers will definitely use a similar approach.

It's all about SIL rating, and flexibility. Industrial control is basically like lego bricks with a mile of paperwork for the safety-critical bricks.

They should auction it off. For pickup only, of course.

I'd like to own the first helicopter on Mars.

It's going to be on display at the Visitor Center when your grandkids visit.

You joke, but Russia did that with their moon rover.

In 1993, to Richard Garriott, for just $68,000: https://www.space.com/8073-privately-owned-soviet-moon-rover...

Richard Garriot aka Lord British who made the Ultima series of videogames?

Yes. Also a space tourist.

Correct. He also flew to the ISS in 2008.

But technically Russia might not have owned title to it in the first place. Sounds almost like an NFT before NFTs existed: --

Space lawyer, Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz (University of Mississippi) said:

without reading the papers or knowing how they were processed and by whom, she can't speak to the validity of the ownership of a space object purchased at auction.

"However, a contention that buying a space object that landed on the lunar surface from a sovereign nation gives rise to a property right to the territory under it is wrong"... said that States-Parties to the Outer Space Treaty of 1966 cannot acquire lunar territory by landing an object on the moon. "The USSR was and Russia is a party to the Outer Space Treaty. It did not acquire the territory under the object when it landed. One cannot sell what one does not own. Since USSR/Russia did not have a property right to the territory under the landed object, there was nothing to sell."

Yeah, but the rover itself was in possesion of russia and is now in posession of Garriot. That is undisputed.

What is rightfully disputed, is whether he also owns the land under the rover. He would like to, but not possible with current laws.

> What is rightfully disputed, is whether he also owns the land under the rover. He would like to, but not possible with current laws.

Actually, contrary to the opinion of Ms. Gabrynowicz, current case law and government/agency positions represented by the Artemis Accords reflect Mr. Garriot's claim. It may have been an untested hypothetical at the time, but in the current political climate it is finding support by all the relevant players. In fact they go even further in asserting exclusions zones much larger than just the regolith undermining a lander or rover.

"In fact they go even further in asserting exclusions zones much larger than just the regolith undermining a lander or rover."

I really hope this won't become reality in the mind of confrontation and being first to claim land, because this will mean, spamming the moon surface with cheap "scientific" equipment to claim lots of land. I mean, what is the bar here for lander? Is it enough to have a flag with it? Then you can have a flag inside a steel cannon ball and shoot many of them across the lunar landscape.

And then we’d have a functioning property market with resellable claims suitable for building a speculative futures market over accessible near-surface resources and other land rights, sufficient to bootstrap a cis-lunar economy without government subsidies?

GREAT, mission accomplished!

IMHO Richard Garriot should go a step further and sell his rover for scrap. Use that to bootstrap a commodities market.

It sounds more like Rai stones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

Good luck getting Russia acknowledging the deal as still valid today.

That's an amazing idea.

Not only could they have fun with that stage but it'd be a fun race to see who could get it for them. Then have a big show when it's brought back to Earth and delivered to the owner.

I could see SpaceX and FedEx team up for some amusing PR on that one.

FedEx you say?

https://tenor.com/view/expanse-the-expanse-fedex-gif-1316756...

Huh, a bit like NFTs (or not at all?), the bragging rights that you have ownership of something on Mars is probably worth some change, especially if you're a billionaire.

A bit like giant stone money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-...

Hasselblad liked to advertise that there were a couple free ones on the moon, you just had to pick them up. To save weight for more sample returns, the Apollo astronauts did the logical thing and kept the film, but chucked the cameras out on the moon.

They chucked a lot of stuff--anything intended for surface use went out the airlock. The cost per pound to bring something back from the moon was higher than the cost per pound of basically anything they brought.

Depends.

If the primary point was to put a man on the moon, the cost of bringing things back is basically free.

If on the other hand the primary mission was bringing back as many rocks as possible, then yes, the return would be very expensive.

> the cost of bringing things back is basically free.

No, because they'd still have to pay to bring all the extra fuel to get the junk back up off the moon and back to Earth. And before that spend the cost of that extra fuel getting it up there. When every pound is like thousands of dollars it really adds up.

But at that point the price has already been paid. If you bring back rocks, or air. Same cost.

If I take a first class flight, how much does it cost to take my phone? Yes I could apportion a fraction of the cost of the ticket to the phone, but most would say free.

Now if the whole purpose of the flight were to get the phone from London to new York, the entire cost should be attributable to the phone, it is the reason for the journey.

Was extra fuel specifically brought? Or was it just safety margin? The Landers had spare fuel when they landed, is that waste, or safety margin?

It's interesting to think about:

The stated mission for the Space Race has often been "put a man in orbit", "put a man on the Moon", "put staff in the space station for X period".

But implicit in all of those mission designs has been the goal of returning the crew alive and in one piece. The record is rather favorable in that regard, and it's always a tragedy when we lose someone.

So that's one of the reasons a crewed Mars missions is a daunting prospect: because even with improved technology, it may be a one-way trip.

Well, it's more of a pyramid scheme. You can send more people to mars than you can send back to earth. So nothing prevents Elon Musk from sending "100" people to mars and 10 person back. Then the people who want to return can lie about how awesome it is on mars and convince more of them to come to secure their own return trip.

Kennedy said "and returning him safely to the earth" in his moon landing proposal speech. It wasn't implicit (on the USA side at least).

A few years back I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on lifting stuff off the moon. At the time there was a company offering $200k/kg to lunar orbit, $1.2M/kg to the lunar surface. The Δv to climb back up is pretty much the same as the descent so I would expect the cost ratio to be similar: Thus $7.2M/kg returned to lunar orbit. At the time I wasn't concerned with going farther, but the escape/injection burn is about half the launch burn--thus you're looking at something like $17M/kg not counting the heat shield and chute (numbers I can't even back-of-the-envelope.)

How many objects are worth $17M/kg?

Better investment than an NFT, at least.

As long as only public museums are allowed to participate

Show HN: This website is served from a helicopter on Mars

Imagine the latency though.

Imagine the egress fees (actually I imagine ingress would be more expensive than we're used to too).

First item on the to-do: add a CDN

I hear spaceflare has decent offerings

Nothing on nebulaflare.

Just don't use solarflare, it completely garbles your traffic. Even fucks up the error correction.

42 minute delay or interplanetary hug of death?

I wonder if they will pick up the trash or we are just littering everywhere in space

I would first check the software license and if i have the "right to repair" on this beauty.

RIP little guy. This project was worth it for the marketing they got out it alone. I've seen so many stories about it since its launch. I hope it resonated with today's youth and gets them interested in space exploration.

Are images of the damage available to the public?

"Imagery revealing damage to the rotor blade arrived several days later."

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/after-three-years-on-mars-nasa...

There is a picture of the helicopter that has arrows in your link, click next and you will see the tip of the blade in a shadow. :(

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26243-ingenuity-spots-the...

Thanks, I missed that!

It looks like it landed on quite an incline, almost 45 degrees.

It takes a few hours to Photoshop over the bite-marks and claw-gouges.

lol nice

Everything about the mission provided valuable data: especially that damaged blade. Failure modes are useful. Next, it might be useful to try flying anyway.

If not, they still have running cameras, sensors and computer, until Perseverance moves out of range.

The rotors will be unbalanced (even if the other side also broke off, chances of the same amount breaking of are as remote as the thing itself), so it will vibrate and probably tip over if it spins too hard

Sure, but that will be more data than guessing and not trying.

It's math about physics (actually mechanical/aerospace engineering), not a guess.

Three years and over 70 flights. That is pure wonder! RIP little guy, you did well.

Poor little buddy broke a wing. Little thing was perhaps the coolest space project ever to my inner 12 year old. My whole family just lived the drama of this whole project. So cool.

I don’t know about the rest of you but we’re going to pour one out for the little guy.

And high compliments to the team that pulled this off. This was an astounding project.

72 flights is a lot for an experimental craft, on Mars, running Linux.

With off-the-shelf components.

Arch?

that's why it crashed on the last flight. They did a 'pacman -Syu' without looking at the archlinux news

I mean that is the fun and joy of running Arch.

From the article:

  The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield.

I wonder if the rover couldn't proceed to the location of the helicopter and get some high res images for diagnostic purposes. I'm sure they considered that option so maybe the rover's schedule is just too busy to accommodate such a mission.

Anyway, R.I.P. Ingenuity and kudos to Nasa for another excellent piece of tech that lasted on another planet for years longer than originally planned.

Also the rover is really, really slow - a few hundred meters on a good day.

Rover time and mission resources are definitely limited and a concern, but apparently the location of the copter is also really inconvenient to access. Its sitting down in a valley middle of big sand ripple field. So its not clear if the rover could reach there even if they wanted to.

That being said, not all hope is lost. While closeups are unlikely, the rover is driving in that general direction so there is (very slight) possibility to catch the copter in some lucky drive-by pic from a distance.

It's pretty great that the point of failure is one of the prop blades vs the cheap-as-chips electronic components. Of course I'm sorry to see it out of commission, but istm they can keep using the cameras, both to gather some information about the weather and to see how long the various components & batteries keep working - at least until it's time to move the rover out of range. Since flight is no longer an option I wonder if the CPU and MCUs can be repurposed to some other sort of task like image analysis.

All in all I think Ingenuity's mission history is a strong argument for experimentation over total advance planning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)#Opposit...

Damage to the blade tip is apparent in the shadow. But I would try one more flight just to see how it fares in such conditions, if it can be corrected in software etc.

Budget-wise, it's not worth trying anything else. There is a lot of prop damage here:

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/e1-pia26243-...

Had the same thought but then wondered if the damage would cause vibration which would then lead to other issues.

To fly Ingenuity has to spin it's propellers very quickly due to the lower atmospheric density compared to Earth and that's a large chunk taken out of the blade. We can already guess what'll happen without testing it and it'll be some variation of the craft shaking itself to pieces and throwing debris all over that chunk of Mars. Better to just let it sit than toss all sorts of trash across the surface that could hit the rover.

Yup. I get the impression this was a forced landing, it put itself down on too steep a slope and caused a rotor strike. Helicopters do not like unbalanced rotors! And think of what happens if it fails at speed: The rotors are 4' across, so 2' from tip to hub. 2,400 rpm for the low end of flight speed. That's 40 rotations per second, the average speed of a rotor is therefore 40 rps * 2' * (2 * pi {path traced by the rotor}) / 2 {for the midpoint of the rotor} = 251 feet per second = 172 miles per hour. A rotor yeeted at 172 miles per hour will go quite a ways on Mars (especially since it's on a slope--it could be lobbed at an angle, not merely flat) and there's a very, very expensive spacecraft nearby. (And it must be nearby--Ingenuity can't talk to Earth. You can't back off to a safe distance and try it.)

They can easily mimic the damage on earth. While there is more gravity, we can adjust atmosphere and measure lift, vibration and whatever. Probably modern engineering tools can do this all in software, but cutting the blade off a drone on earth is easy. Only if we are convinced by on earth simulation that we can still fly this should we attempt it. Otherwise attempting flight this risks doing more damage to something else. (the rover is too far away, so I guess not much - but that also means we can't observe what happens and adjust based on the rovers sensors)

They can also account for gravity by pulling up on it with a tether (in a large vacuum chamber simulating the Martian atmosphere). That's how they tested the design originally.

That is just genius. NASA is wasting all this money on engineers when they could just ask HN.

Don't be an ass. Someone saying what they would do isn't a criticism of NASA's ability to engineer. If it was worded more strongly it might be a criticism of NASA management, but even then neither side would be objectively correct.

They talked about why they don't think it will fly anymore in the media briefing:

- Ingenuity is balanced down to fractions of a gram, and any imbalance, especially at the speed that Ingenuity spins its rotor at, will cause the spacecraft to tear itself apart.

- Most of the lift comes from the last 25 - 30% of its lift capacity. They think they lost about 25% of the rotor blade, and even if somehow the other blades lost the exact same amount to be completely balanced, there's just not enough lift left.

Might as well yolo it at this point

Can they just do one more #YOLO flight at a high speed and high altitude as possible and see what happens? Seems more useful and fun than just leaving it to rot.

Probably don't want any flying debris hitting the rover.

It's nearly a kilometer from the rover, should be fine.

But I agree that it's better to leave it, download the remaining images and data from memory, maybe leave the software running as an experiment in non-rad-hardened computers on the surface, and eventually put it in a museum, than risk it crashing in spectacular fashion.

The tips of the rotors approach the speed of sound. Around Mach 0.95.

I'm sure someone can do the math on the maximum debris field, but I think it'll be larger than you're thinking.

Agreed: Our earth-based intuition is probably pretty off when the atmosphere creates 1% as much friction as it does here.

I doubt the debris field would be 1km in size. Assume you throw a high-speed small piece of propeller tip debris at the optimal angle at 240 m/s or about 800 fps. I'm sure it goes farther in lower Martian gravity and atmosphere but a spinning lead air rifle pellet at that speed and the optimal high-arc trajectory could barely make it half that far on Earth. None of the ballistics tables have columns for Martian atmosphere or gravity. (Yet! I hope I live to see a day when we could use this information, but not quite as much as I hope that we never have to use this in anger.)

But even in the worst case, you're scattering a 1.8 kilogram robot (more accurately, a few grams of the rotor blades) over an area of pi square kilometers. The chance that a large chunk hits Perseverance just wrong is negligible.

It won't make it off the ground. Ingenuity has to spin it's rotors about 10 times faster than it does here on Earth. With that big of a chunk missing there's no way it can fly it'd tear itself to pieces during the spin up.

> more useful and fun than just leaving it to rot

Ginny has an independent solar panel/battery set-up. Perhaps it could be rigged as a lone stationary sensor?

I wonder if it could even use its rotors to periodically blow away dust on the panels?

It can't communicate over long distances, so it wouldn't be able to communicate with Earth after Perseverance drives out of range.

I'm pretty sure none of my terrestrial drones have lasted more than a few dozen flights—72 across the solar system is impressive engineering!

The helicopter is one of the coolest things NASA's ever done. 72 flights. Wow. Great job, folks.

Designed for five, lasted 72, not too shabby.

I dunno, feels like they overshot it. They should talk to the engineers that made my washing machine. That thing was designed to outlast the warranty and, I'll be damned, they nailed it.

Only so much genius to go around.

Extraplanetary missions are almost always many times longer than initially designed because the initial mission is largely limited by the budget which includes the price of the people here on Earth and the time available on the Deep Space Network. Building a rover robust enough to last way longer than the basic mission is a blip in the budget when you include that and the launch costs so they keep being run until they're surpassed by another mission, they run out of some consumable (on Curiosity for example there's a limited number of times they can run some of the internal equipment), or they're out of new things to find to justify the cost of going on.

With the rovers its pretty much a given that they'll out last the initially stated 90 day mission. They're much more expensive and carefully crafted for the task.

Ingenuity is special because it's commercial off-the-shelf parts put together on a low-ish budget. It (as well as various other aspects of Perseverance) has shown that Mars can be tolerable for off the shelf hardware, rather than needing bespoke million dollar projects for everything.

Generally they're either run until there's not much science left to do so funding dries up or there's some catastrophic failure of the rover itself. I'm not sure how much COTS you can actually do for future missions for flying rovers. A demonstrator is easier because it doesn't need the specialized scientific equipment that comes with doing science beyond looking at something from ground level.

The point is that you can reduced costs for some things via COTS, and if COTS stuff can handle the rough environment, there's also the possibility of reducing costs by further ruggedizing those parts.

Of course the mission critical stuff will still have to all be the usual expensive purpose built stuff, but like with Perseverance, some scientific instruments can use COTS computing hardware (IIRC one of the instruments on Perseverance has two Intel Atom SBCs, which were used to compress the landing footage before sending it back to Earth) and can have stuff like a bunch of non-essential but nice to have cameras, microphones and other sensors.

Since they were cheap and non-essential, it's no big deal to add them, no big deal if they don't work, but if they happen to work you get great PR and data, like proper video of a spacecraft autonomously landing from a rocket powered crane on another planet). Same with prototyping ideas. Maybe the success of Ingenuity will encourage the inclusion of other similar "pie in the sky", extremely low cost experimental components.

Great run.

They're gonna have trouble justifying buying the extended warranty next time.

Maybe sometime in the future NASA will deploy a service or repair pit stop station for all their crafts on Mars. Imagine that, if a craft is damaged another automaton is deployed to retrieve the damaged craft where it is transported to the pit stop to be fixed or for routine maintenance. This will improve service life and only the service station would need manual intervention ie. Restocking for parts.

So you would have a service station and a manufacturing station, that's nuclear powered and retrofitted with a 3D printer that can produce custom crafts on Mars.

I often ponder about what will the result be of having a human colony on Mars or the Moon? Think about the ethical implications, what about if someone commits a murder? Or breaks a law ( will there even be laws? Who creates the law? Who will deliver judgement? Will there be a jury? ) it just breaks my mind.

I highly recommend the book A City on Mars, which explores these topics in a humorous, but well-researched, light.

I don't know a lot about these missions. Does the rover have a sample gathering arm? would it be possible for the helicopter to be picked up and set onto something? or carried around? seems like it would be useful to have the backup connection route to the rover like when they used the helicopter to troubleshoot the rover a while back. Or alternatively even as a backup sensor suite for the rover.

Plus the imagery of the rover carrying around its wounded little friend is too nice to pass up on

I like your creative thinking. Perseverance does have an arm with a drill, cameras, dust puffer, rock grinder, and spectrometers at the end.

However, Ingenuity is deep in a dune field which Perseverance can't drive into. The rover is too heavy to safely drive in deep sand -- it would get stuck.

I wonder why they only sent one? Why couldn't they send 3-5 identical helicopters so they still had a few more to spare?

(The hover weights ~1000kg, the helicopter ~1kg)

Ingenuity was designed to fit under the rover, and occupied the available volume pretty completely. Check out the video of how it was deployed. Even if a multiple deployment system could be designed and the budget was available, there would probably need to be changes to the rover (which is based on Curiosity's design), and these things tend to make cost and complexity balloon. But, redundancy would be nice -- Mars Sample Return helicopter proposes a pair of helicopters.

Apparently the computer on ingenuity is tons more powerful than anything ever sent to space. Will they be able to utilize that processing power for any other purpose on mars? Just cause it is no longer airworthy, doesn’t mean it’s totally dead.

I remember watching the youtube stream when it took its first flight 2 years ago. I still get goosebumps when the engineers analyze the flight logs and confirm that it was successful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1KolyCqICI&t=2251s

For some reason, this kind of news always makes me sad. Like emotionally.

Probably because of this https://xkcd.com/695/

NASA has done an effective job at connecting with regular people. Goes to show, how even something as small as naming something differently makes a big shift in the mindset.

I sometimes personify things too--impossible to throw away old stuffed animals. I just tell myself these objects fulfilled their purpose, and that makes them happy.

I've always preferred this alternative rewrite: https://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/spirit_rewrite_unknown_author.png

Thank you, that's much more aligned with the spirit of a rover that I imagine

That xkcd gets me every time.

So, it still landed, upright no less, with a piece of the rotor blade missing? I'd guess that when a piece of rotor comes off during flight, the imbalance would make landing impossible. Very curious to what happened, but probably we'll never know exactly.

My guess would be that the rotor struck the ground during landing.

If I'm interpreting the picture correctly, it does look like there is a gouge on the ground in the pic showing the shadow

Also, there are some very interesting shiny blue rocks in that photo. I assume scrapped by the rotor. I would be very interested in a xenogeology article on this.

Maybe those are pieces of rotor? I know the rotors look white in the other picture, but maybe the broken surface is different and/or they look bluish reflecting light in that picture.

Landing is easy. Landing without causing further damage, though...

How did the prop tip get damaged like that? Did it crash into something?

Most likely.

> Communication with Ingenuity was lost again at the end of the 72nd flight on January 18, 2024. JPL regained contact on January 20.

Not an expert here but I assume the loss of contact was caused by some crash or something.

They mentioned during the media briefing that the terrain they were flying in were featureless, which is extremely challenging for it to determine where it's at, and thus it's possible that it misidentified some aspect of the terrain and caused this. Unfortunately because communication was lost when it landed, the flight data was lost, so we will never know for sure what happened.

It doesn't save flight data until it receives confirmation of download?

During flight, high-rate flight data is written to volatile RAM, and 1HZ data is telemetered to Perseverance. The high-rate data is not written to disk until landing, because writing to disk is slow and CPU-intensive. There was a brownout during or just before landing, and sadly that meant the high-rate telemetry data was lost because it was never written to disk.

And by "disk" I mean non-volatile flash memory.

Okay, so we do have a subset of the flight data.

Thanks for the info.

Yes, and the team is vigorously studying the 1HZ data leading up to the brownout.

That achievement is spectacular! Based on my experience flying drones, 72 flights is about 72 flights more than I can do without damaging the blades....

so what type of missions could this reliably be used for in the future that justify the cost? it seems it flew for ~2 hours which seems expensive and risky to me? I know the craft was relatively cheap and the experiment was worth doing but going forward with mars, can we use these effectively somehow?

nvm these craft are super inexpensive and obviously can get access to areas rovers cant

Ingenuity? Pah!

Couldn't it MacGyver a fix for the damaged blade, using materials at hand?

Seriously though, great job you plucky little 'copter.

Wasn't it only supposed to fly just a few time but it blew that number out of the water. Great job NASA engineers!

Five flights was the original mission plan.

So how long before we send a swarm of 100s of these to image the entire planet up close and personal?

amazing work by the team at nasa.

we'll get there and repair it so it does fly again in a few years :')

Greatly exceeded expectations. This little heli has earned its place in space history.

Sad to hear but kudos for an absolute feat of engineering.

That was an amazing run. Well done Genny!

Rest in Peace little dude

https://xkcd.com/695/

And of course the happy version:

http://xkcdsw.com/3968

Thank you so much. The sad version was, somehow, actually upsetting.

"Hotel" by Boichi:

https://imgur.com/a/DdLCU

In other news, some reliability engineer at NASA somewhere is very happy to have a new data point.

"Oh, so that's where....."

Was the singular focus on the Wright Brothers' contributions to flight and ingenuity a fair one?

I had thought there was some shift in the Wright Brothers' attribution to flight in general.

It seemed like better recognition of the contributions by Samuel Langley and Glenn Curtiss' to flight technology were along with acknowledgement of the WB's own efforts to boost their legacy might have checked a decision to keep pouring on the WB-were-the-ones narrative.

Where did they talk about the Wrights? This on the wrong article?

It's part of the video of Bill Nelsons speech that's embedded in the article.

It was not about the contribution but about the moment.

The Wright brothers achieved the first powered flight on earth and Ingenuity achieved the first powered flight on another planet.

I think people are well aware that it's neither the Wright brothers nor ingenuity as a singular entity that did what ultimately concluded in that achievement but rather the scientific effort of humanity as a whole.

I disagree, if anything, the Wright brothers’ documented first powered flight and desperate effort to control the technology and historical narrative have caused other contributors to continue to go unrecognized in important mainstream media like this.

If it was the scientific effort of humanity as a whole, then it seems like the director would have simply compared it to the profound effort toward manned flight.

After all, we have Langley Air Force Base and NASA’s own Langley Research Center.

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