Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

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Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#1 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Tue Jun 23, 2020 4:38 pm



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

Solar panel charges Lithium-ion batteries, providing enough energy for one 90-second flight per Martian day (~350 Watts of average power during flight). Range about 980 feet +- 300 metres per day!
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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#2 Post by llondel » Sat Jun 27, 2020 3:08 am

I have an affinity with this mission too, one of its tasks is to collect samples for a later mission to recover. NASA held a challenge for this, over several years and our team came second, one of only two to achieve anything. I'm in the video too, wearing the light green shirt and dark green hat.



The task was to navigate, without using GPS or compass, to nominated area, search for a target sample and if found, collect it. The objective was to get as many as possible back on the start platform. Only two teams got anything back on the platform.

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#3 Post by G-CPTN » Sat Jun 27, 2020 10:29 am

Pneumatic tyres - how would they cope with the much-reduced (compared to Earth) atmospheric pressure?

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#4 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Jun 27, 2020 10:58 am

G-CPTN wrote:
Sat Jun 27, 2020 10:29 am
Pneumatic tyres - how would they cope with the much-reduced (compared to Earth) atmospheric pressure?
I guess they use a much lower tyre pressure to inflate the tyres and may not even use air to do so.

llondel will set me straight I am sure! :)
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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#5 Post by ian16th » Sat Jun 27, 2020 12:37 pm

Dont use air these days.
Since I bought my last set of tyres my very Earth bound Mazda has been rolling on nitrogen filled Bridgestone's.
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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#6 Post by G-CPTN » Sat Jun 27, 2020 12:44 pm

I was thinking about the ambient pressure effect on whatever is used to fill the tyres.
Relative to Earth, the air on Mars is extremely thin.
Standard sea-level air pressure on Earth is 1,013 millibars.
On Mars the surface pressure varies through the year, but it averages 6 to 7 millibars.
That's less than one percent of sea level pressure here.
Nitrogen is a gas and is still affected by changes in ambient temperature (about one psi for every 10° Fahrenheit).
Nitrogen filled tyres will require pressure be added during the winter months as ambient temperatures and tyre pressures drop.
Nitrogen is good but can't change the laws of physics.

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#7 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Jun 27, 2020 3:43 pm

G-CPTN wrote:
Sat Jun 27, 2020 12:44 pm
I was thinking about the ambient pressure effect on whatever is used to fill the tyres.
Relative to Earth, the air on Mars is extremely thin.
Standard sea-level air pressure on Earth is 1,013 millibars.
On Mars the surface pressure varies through the year, but it averages 6 to 7 millibars.
That's less than one percent of sea level pressure here.
Nitrogen is a gas and is still affected by changes in ambient temperature (about one psi for every 10° Fahrenheit).
Nitrogen filled tyres will require pressure be added during the winter months as ambient temperatures and tyre pressures drop.
Nitrogen is good but can't change the laws of physics.
You have piqued my interest... :)

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#8 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Jun 27, 2020 4:58 pm

Mesh tyres rule - https://www.space.com/39305-metal-tires ... overs.html
The new tire is made of a "shape memory alloy" composed of nickel and titanium. These alloys bend and twist like other metals (in materials science parlance, they are ductile rather than brittle). What makes them different is their atomic structure, which tends to resume its original shape after the alloy is bent, stressed or deformed.
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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#9 Post by llondel » Sat Jun 27, 2020 9:28 pm

The competition was a proof of concept, NASA were less interested in the robot side of things, they know how to do that, they were more interested in how to do navigation and pick-up. They did like our mechanism for picking stuff up and our navigation method was different to what other people did (those big blocky patterns are a big part of it). There were also two strategies for what to do with collected samples - ours, and that of the winning team, was to immediately return to base with each sample collected and deposit it, because that was points in the bag. It had a time cost, we had to do as much as we could in a two hour run and clearly heading back to base each time incurred a time penalty. The other strategy is to leave the platform, go to each search area in turn and then return to base at the end of two hours. One team was doing really well with this and had successfully collected a bunch of samples, potentially worth $100k or more in prize money, but they botched their last software update (aka "comms from Earth") and their robot disappeared off at 180 degrees from where it was supposed to go and crashed the boundary fence so they didn't get any samples back on the platform.

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#10 Post by Boac » Thu Oct 29, 2020 10:51 am

Just over half-way now, travelling at 60k mph +

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#11 Post by PHXPhlyer » Thu Jan 28, 2021 12:43 am

Perseverance rover will begin an 'epic journey' on Mars next month

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/world/pe ... index.html

After '7 minutes of terror,' NASA's Perseverance rover will begin an 'epic journey' on Mars next month
Ashley Strickland-Profile-Image
By Ashley Strickland, CNN

(CNN)In 22 days, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will land on Mars in Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient life that may have been on the red planet in the past.

The rover, which is the largest and most advanced rover NASA has ever built, will act as a robotic geologist, collecting samples of dirt and rocks that will eventually be returned to Earth by the 2030s.
For that reason, Perseverance is also the cleanest machine ever sent to Mars, designed so it doesn't contaminate the Martian samples with any microbes from Earth, providing a false reading.
Live coverage from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be available on the agency's website on February 18, the day of the landing, beginning at 2:15 p.m. ET.
The mission teams have made many modifications due to the pandemic, but they have adapted to work safely and effectively. The team that will be at JPL during the landing conducted an adapted simulation of the landing that transpired last week over three days.

"Don't let anybody tell you different -- landing on Mars is hard to do," said John McNamee, project manager for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission at JPL, in a statement. "But the women and men on this team are the best in the world at what they do. When our spacecraft hits the top of the Mars atmosphere at about three-and-a-half miles per second, we'll be ready."
Perseverance is the latest step in NASA's long history of exploring the red planet. It builds on lessons learned from previous missions with new goals that will shed more light on the history of Mars.

"NASA has been exploring Mars since Mariner 4 performed a flyby in July of 1965, with two more flybys, seven successful orbiters, and eight landers since then," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in a statement.
"Perseverance, which was built from the collective knowledge gleaned from such trailblazers, has the opportunity to not only expand our knowledge of the Red Planet, but to investigate one of the most important and exciting questions of humanity about the origin of life both on Earth and also on other planets."
The spacecraft, launched in July, only has about 25.6 million miles left of its 292.5 million-mile adventure from Earth to Mars. And once it arrives at Mars, the rover's journey to the planet's surface starts with a bang.
The teams at NASA call it the "seven minutes of terror."
And just weeks after the landing, video cameras and microphones on the spacecraft will show the rover's perspective of this harrowing experience.
'Seven minutes of terror'
The one-way light time it takes for radio signals to travel from Earth to Mars is about 10.5 minutes, which means the seven minutes it takes for the spacecraft to land on Mars will occur without any help or intervention from NASA teams on Earth.
This is the "seven minutes of terror." The ground teams tell the spacecraft when to begin EDL (entry, descent and landing) and the spacecraft takes over from there.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most critical and dangerous part of the mission, according to Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing lead at JPL.
"It is not guaranteed that we will be successful," Zurbuchen acknowledged. The mission teams, however, have done everything they can to prepare for a successful landing.
This rover is the heaviest that NASA has ever attempted to land, weighing in at over a metric ton.
The spacecraft hits the top of the Martian atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour and has to slow down to zero miles per hour seven minutes later when the rover softly lands on the surface.
It will streak across the Martian sky like a meteor, Chen said.

About 10 minutes before entering the thin Martian atmosphere, the cruise stage that has carried the spacecraft on its journey through space is shed and the rover prepares for a guided entry, where small thrusters on the aeroshell help adjust its angle.
The spacecraft's heat shield will endure peak heating of 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit, 75 seconds after entering the atmosphere.
Perseverance is targeting a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed and river delta, the most challenging site yet for a NASA spacecraft landing on Mars. Rather than being flat and smooth, the small landing site is littered with sand dunes, steep cliffs, boulders and small craters.
The spacecraft has two upgrades -- called Range Trigger and Terrain-Relative Navigation -- to navigate this difficult and hazardous site.
Range Trigger will tell the 70.5-foot-wide parachute when to deploy based on the spacecraft's position 240 seconds after entering the atmosphere. After the parachute deploys, the heat shield will detach.
Perseverance will do things no rover has ever attempted on Mars — and pave the way for humans
Perseverance will do things no rover has ever attempted on Mars — and pave the way for humans
The rover's Terrain-Relative Navigation acts like a second brain, using cameras to take pictures of the ground as it rapidly approaches and determines the safest spot to land. It can shift the landing spot by up to 2,000 feet, according to NASA.
The back shell and parachute separate after the heat shield is discarded when the spacecraft is 1.3 miles above the Martian surface. The Mars landing engines, which include eight retrorockets, will fire to slow the descent from 190 miles per hour to about 1.7 miles per hour.
Then, the famed sky crane maneuver that landed the Curiosity rover will occur. Nylon cords will lower the rover 25 feet below the descent stage. After the rover touches down on the Martian surface, the cords will detach and the descent stage will fly away and land at a safe distance.
On the surface of Mars
Once the rover has landed, Perseverance's two-year mission will begin, and it will go through a "checkout" period to make sure it's ready.

The rover will also find a nice, flat surface to drop the Ingenuity helicopter so it has a place to use as a helipad for its potential five test flights during a 30-day period. This will occur within the first 50 to 90 sols, or Martian days, of the mission.
Once Ingenuity is settled on the surface, Perseverance will drive to a safe spot at a distance and use its cameras to watch Ingenuity's flight.
This will be the first flight of a helicopter on another planet.

After those flights, Perseverance will begin searching for evidence of ancient life, study Mars' climate and geology and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth via planned future missions. It will drive three times faster than previous rovers.
Jezero Crater was chosen as Perseverance's home because billions of years ago, the basin was the site of a lake and river delta. Rocks and dirt from this basin could provide fossilized evidence of past microbial life, as well as more information about what ancient Mars was like.
"Perseverance's sophisticated science instruments will not only help in the hunt for fossilized microbial life, but also expand our knowledge of Martian geology and its past, present, and future," said Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020, in a statement.
"Our science team has been busy planning how best to work with what we anticipate will be a firehose of cutting-edge data. That's the kind of 'problem' we are looking forward to."

The path Perseverance will traverse is about 15 miles long, an "epic journey" that will take years, Farley said. What scientists could discover about Mars, though, is worth the journey.
Perseverance also carries instruments that could help further exploration on Mars in the future, like MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This experiment, about the size of a car battery, will attempt to convert Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Not only could this help NASA scientists learn how to produce rocket fuel on Mars, but also oxygen that could be use during future human exploration of the red planet.
"The mission provides hope and unity," Zurbuchen said. "As our cosmic neighbor, Mars continues to captivate our imagination."

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#12 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jan 28, 2021 7:54 am

The Ingenuity helicopter really intrigues me, not least because the Martian atmospheric pressure is only +- 1% that of earth's at the lowest point on the planet's surface . The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to the density found 35 km above the Earth's surface. At places like the mighty Olympus Mons, the summit is effectively in the vacuum of space. The implication of these basic facts is that the helicopter will have to be one very high revving mother and that then begs the question of where the energy will come from given the feeble sunlight, even at the Martian equator. In the light of all these variables, this helicopter will be more of a helihopter, jumping 300 metres (see video in the first post) before the batteries are exhausted with the need for hours of recharging before the next hop.

Some more even detailed research is underway at Castle Goblin.
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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#13 Post by Pontius Navigator » Thu Jan 28, 2021 9:00 am

I wonder if they have tested the concept in a near vacuum chamber?

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#14 Post by Boac » Thu Jan 28, 2021 9:23 am

Don't forget everything weighs 66% less.

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#15 Post by PHXPhlyer » Mon Jul 03, 2023 5:05 pm

Mars helicopter Ingenuity phones home, breaking 63-day silence
By Mike Wall published 3 days ago
Rugged terrain had kept Ingenuity from communicating with its robotic partner, the Perseverance rover.

https://www.space.com/mars-helicopter-i ... SmartBrief

The Ingenuity Mars helicopter's two-month silent stretch is over.

Ingenuity got in touch with its handlers on June 28 via its robotic parter, the Perseverance rover, NASA officials announced today (June 30). It was the first such communication since April 26, when the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper went dark toward the end of its 52nd flight on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater.

"The portion of Jezero Crater the rover and helicopter are currently exploring has a lot of rugged terrain, which makes communications dropouts more likely," Ingenuity team lead Josh Anderson, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement today.

"The team’s goal is to keep Ingenuity ahead of Perseverance, which occasionally involves temporarily pushing beyond communication limits," Anderson added. "We're excited to be back in communications range with Ingenuity and receive confirmation of Flight 52."

Ingenuity covered 1,191 feet (363 meters) of ground on the 139-second-long Flight 52. The main goals of the sortie were to reposition the chopper and snap photos for Perseverance's science team, NASA officials said.

The newly received flight data suggest that Ingenuity remains in good health. If further checkouts confirm that, the chopper could fly again within the next few weeks, team members said.

Ingenuity and the life-hunting, sample-collecting Perseverance landed inside Jezero in February 2021. The chopper quickly aced its primary mission, a five-flight campaign designed to show that aerial exploration is feasible on Mars. Ingenuity then embarked on an extended mission, during which it's serving as a scout for Perseverance.

All communications to and from Ingenuity must be routed through Perseverance. That explains the recent silent spell, which the two mission teams had expected: The rover had disappeared behind a hill from the helicopter's perspective, and it didn't come back into view until June 28.

Ingenuity's handlers have battled through other communications issues lately as well. In early April, for example, the chopper went dark for six days, a surprise dropout that had the mission team sweating a bit.

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#16 Post by Boac » Mon Jul 03, 2023 6:02 pm

A truly amazing piece of technology.

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Re: Helicopter Ingenuity on its way to Mars soon!

#17 Post by PHXPhlyer » Thu Feb 01, 2024 9:29 pm

NASA to 'wiggle' broken Ingenuity Mars helicopter's blades to analyze damage
News
By Brett Tingley published about 8 hours ago
"We couldn't be prouder or happier with how our little baby has done."

https://www.space.com/nasa-mars-helicop ... SmartBrief

Ingenuity's mission is officially coming to an end, but not before mission scientists try to determine how much damage the helicopter suffered.

NASA held a livestream Wednesday (Jan. 31) to pay tribute to Mars helicopter Ingenuity, which suffered rotor damage on its most recent flight. During the livestream, mission managers revealed that all four of Ingenuity's blades were damaged during a rough landing on the Red Planet surface.

Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity Project Manager, said that NASA and JPL still aren't sure what caused the damage to Ingenuity's blades; it remains unclear whether the helicopter's power dipped during landing, causing unwanted ground contact, or if it accidentally struck the ground to cause a "brownout."

Tzanetos added that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will slowly rotate the helicopter's blades and "wiggle" them, or adjust their angle, while collecting video in order to allow the team to determine the extent of Ingenuity's damage. However, Tzanetos said that no matter what such imaging will show, the dual-rotor drone has flown its last flight and will soon end its mission.

"Helicopters like this are not designed to fly even with the smallest fraction of a grant of imbalance and we're gonna have the end of our mission in the weeks ahead," Tzanetos said during the livestream.

Related: 'It's sort of been invincible until this moment:' Mars helicopter Ingenuity pilot says 'bland' terrain may have doomed NASA chopper

During the NASA Science Live webcast, Tzanetos and Tiffany Morgan, NASA's Mars Exploration Program Deputy Director, sang the praises of the plucky 'copter. Morgan described how Ingenuity proved to be a valuable companion for the Perseverance rover, with whom it has been exploring Mars since the pair landed on Feb. 18, 2021.

The helicopter was initially designed to make just five flights — its mission ended after number 72.

"Not only did it help us with designing for future missions, but it also helped with Perseverance's current mission. It scouted ahead and took a sneak peek at the operations Perseverance is going to experience, and that allowed the planners to navigate the terrain as well as to identify potentially compelling science targets," Morgan said.

The fact that Ingenuity was able to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere and carry out as many sorties as it did is a true testament to JPL's expertise and could foreshadow future missions, she added.

"The NASA JPL team didn't just demonstrate the technology, they demonstrated an approach that if we use in the future will really help us to explore other planets and be as awe-inspiring, as amazing, as Ingenuity has been," Morgan said.

The helicopter far exceeded the agency's expectations, especially given the fact that it was built with off-the-shelf commercial cell phone components and represented a largely unknown premise: Flying an aircraft on another planet.

"We couldn't be prouder or happier with how our little baby has done," Tzanetos said. "It's been the mission of a lifetime for all of us. And I wanted to say thank you to all of the people here that gave their weekends, their late nights. All the engineers, the aerodynamic scientists, the technicians who hand-crafted this aircraft."

Morgan added that NASA is already envisioning using future helicopters on other planets or celestial bodies that will be built on the foundation that Ingenuity has laid and the knowledge the agency has gained from this completed mission.

"I really look forward to the future and what we can do with with the offspring of Ingenuity," she said.

PP

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