3 For Mars

[TheGreenGoblin]

Landing sequence underway...

Now 150 km above Mars...

[TheGreenGoblin]

Down...safely...

[TheGreenGoblin]

First images coming back...

[4mastacker]

Some excited people in the US.

[TheGreenGoblin]

• Well done NASA!

[Boac]

A great mission.

[G-CPTN]

Quite an achievement to plan the actions to be executed in a slightly hostile environment at great distance.

Information on the interweb suggest delays between 20 and 40 minutes - I expect that depends on where in orbit each planet is.

I presume that the NASA TV programme was being run allowing for the transmission time.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Now let's see if they can fly the helicopter Ingenuity!

What with the sophistication of the onboard instrumentation, the search for evidence of life, or not, will hopefully be advanced!

[TheGreenGoblin]

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

"00000001000000000001000001001000000001010001111111111111111111111111111111111111"
"00000011010000001001000000011100000010000000010100000001100100011111111111111111"
"00000101000000001000000000100100000011100000000111000001001100011111111111111111"
"00000101110000100010000000101100001110100000001110000111011000000010100000011111"

Internet sleuths claim to have decoded a hidden message displayed on the parachute that helped Nasa’s Perseverance Rover land safely on Mars last week. They claim that the phrase “Dare mighty things” – used as a motto by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – was encoded on the parachute using a pattern representing letters as binary computer code.

Reddit users and social media posters on Twitter noticed that the red-and-white pattern on the parachute looked deliberate, and arrived at the result by using the red to represent the figure one, and the white to represent zero.

Each of the concentric rings in the parachute’s pattern represents one of the words. The zeroes and ones need to be split up into chunks of 10 characters, and from that, adding 64 gives you the computer ASCII code representing a letter. For example, seven white stripes, a red stripe and then two more white stripes represents 0000000100, the binary for four. Adding 64 to that gives 68, the ASCII code for the letter D.

The pattern on the outer-edge of the parachute is additionally believed to represent 34°11’58” N 118°10’31” W, the geolocation code for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which carried out much of the work on Perseverance.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... -parachute

[TheGreenGoblin]

Is there a requirement for the Automobile Association on Mars?

Nasa has released a 16-minute audio recording of a mysterious “high-pitched scratching noise” captured by its Perseverance rover on Mars.

The rover’s entry, descent and landing (EDL) microphone also captured “bangs, pings and rattles” made by Perseverance’s six metal wheels and suspension on its first test drive two weeks ago, though Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory only published them on Wednesday.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... wsource=cl

[Boac]

Apparently a small piece of fabric from The Wright 'flyer' is taped to a cable on the Mars helicopeter - a nice gesture for the first attempted flight on Mars.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Apparently a small piece of fabric from The Wright 'flyer' is taped to a cable on the Mars helicopeter - a nice gesture for the first attempted flight on Mars.

In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a plane for 12 seconds, 120 feet in the air, on what is now known as the first powered-controlled flight on Earth. Now, 118 years later, the first powered-controlled attempt at a flight on another planet is about to take place.

According to NASA, Ingenuity — the four-pound rotorcraft attached to Perseverance — is on its way to its "airfield" on Mars.

The space agency announced that its target for its first takeoff attempt will happen no earlier than April 8, 2021.

Ingenuity was designed as an experiment to see if it is possible to fly on Mars as we do here on Earth. And the process leading up to the takeoff is a very meticulous one. Consider how long it took humans to stick a powered-controlled flight on Earth; given Mars' thin atmosphere and a twenty-minute delay in communication, it is arguably more challenging on Mars.

"As with everything with the helicopter, this type of deployment has never been done before," Farah Alibay, Mars helicopter integration lead for the Perseverance rover, said in a press statement. "Once we start the deployment there is no turning back."

Every move for the next couple of weeks could make or break Ingenuity's success — starting with precisely positioning the rotorcraft in the middle of its 33-by-33-foot square airfield, which is actually a flat field on the Martian surface with no obstructions. From there, the entire deployment process from Perseverance will take about six Martian days, which are called sols. (The Martian sol is thirty-nine minutes longer than an Earth day.)

Ingenuity on Mars

[llondel]

Don't they have a huge vacuum chamber somewhere in the US? I would hope they put it in there at appropriate air density to test if it would really fly.

[TheGreenGoblin]

[PHXPhlyer]

NASA helicopter set for historic first flight on Mars

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/n ... rs-rcna624

NASA helicopter set for historic first flight on Mars
If successful, the short jaunt will be the first powered, controlled flight ever conducted on another planet.

April 9, 2021, 9:42 AM MST
By Denise Chow
On a flat, barren expanse of Martian real estate, a tiny helicopter is poised to make aviation history.

NASA's experimental Mars helicopter, known as Ingenuity, is scheduled to take its much-anticipated first test flight on the red planet on Sunday. If successful, the joyride will be the first powered, controlled flight conducted on another planet.

"Ingenuity is an experimental engineering flight test — we want to see if we can fly at Mars," MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity helicopter's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.

The helicopter's first outing has drawn comparisons to Dec. 17, 1903, when Orville and Wilbur Wright completed the first powered and controlled flight on Earth. Though the brothers took turns making several flights that day, Orville was at the helm when the milestone was set, flying 120 feet in 12 seconds into frigid headwinds near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Last month, NASA revealed that a postage stamp-size swatch of fabric from the Wright brothers' first airplane, the 1903 Wright Flyer, was attached to a cable beneath the Ingenuity's solar panel.

The small, 4-pound helicopter hitched a ride to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which touched down in an area of Mars known as Jezero Crater on Feb. 18. Weeks after landing, the rover transported Ingenuity to its "airfield," a flat 33-foot-by-33-foot patch of the Martian landscape.

On Sunday, the helicopter will attempt to fly for the first time in Mars' thin atmosphere. During the test flight, which could last up to 30 seconds, the helicopter will climb to 10 feet above the Martian surface and hover for up to 30 seconds before touching down again, according to NASA.

While that short jaunt may seem simple, gravity on Mars is one-third that of Earth's, and the red planet's atmosphere is only 1 percent as dense as Earth's atmosphere, which all combined make controlled flight more challenging.

"Mars is hard," Aung said.

Engineers and flight controllers will also have to deal with a communications lag, which means NASA won't know how the helicopter performed — or even if it survives — until early Monday morning.

If the first jaunt is deemed a success, NASA may attempt additional experimental flights, taking the helicopter out to farther distances and higher altitudes. Ingenuity is designed to operate on Mars for about 31 days, according to the agency.

NASA has said small helicopters could be groundbreaking for future expeditions to Mars and for other planetary science missions.

Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters, said in a statement that Ingenuity could "further expand our horizons and broaden the scope of what is possible with Mars exploration."

And after nearly two months of checking its instruments and conducting tests, NASA is preparing to kick off the Perseverance rover's two-year mission to roam the surface of Mars and search for signs of ancient microbial life.

PP

[llondel]

What's the betting that if it does get off the ground, there will be a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly shortly afterwards?

After all, flying is easy, it's landing that's hard.

[TheGreenGoblin]

What's the betting that if it does get off the ground, there will be a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly shortly afterwards?

After all, flying is easy, it's landing that's hard.

I will be fascinated to see how this works. The physical testing of this machine was very difficult given the complexities of simulating the low gravity situation in combination with the thin atmosphere and the many control difficulties associated with rotor craft generally. A lot of the issues had to be simulated mathematically using high powered computers. I suspect it will work fine but there, I may have just doomed the mission.



Really like this guy's videos...

[Boac]

Rotors turned (slowly) yesterday.

[TheGreenGoblin]

NASA confirmed April 11 for when Ingenuity will attempt its first flight on Mars. Liftoff is at 12:30pm local Mars solar time, which is 10:54pm ET on Earth. NASA is set to release the outcome and data in a livestream at 3:30am ET Mon.

The plan is for the copter to fly 10ft above the surface, hover and then land.

From the Wail

[llondel]

I hope they've moved the rover to a safe distance. It would be tragic if it went out of control and smashed into the rover.