One of the fun aspects of exploring a new planet is that you can set a lot of new records, as is the case with the very first Mars-based helicopter, Ingenuity. Since its inaugural flight on April 19th of 2021, Ingenuity has flown 61 times, setting various records for distance traveled and other parameters. Although setting the first record is easy on account of anything being better than literally nothing, the real challenge lies in exceeding previously set records, as the team behind Ingenuity seeks to do again with flight 62 and a new speed record.
Targeting October 12th, the goal is to travel 268 meters (1.33 furlong) at a maximum altitude of 18 meters while hitting 10 meters per second (36 km/h), which would shatter the 8 m/s (28.8 km/h) set by flight 60. Although still quite a distance to the 240 m/s required to hit Mach 1 on Mars, the fact that this feat is being performed by a first-of-its-kind helicopter in the thin Martian atmosphere, using off-the-shelf components that were expected to last maybe a handful of flights, is nothing short of amazing.
(Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip!)
(Top image: Fourth flight of Ingenuity (circled), captured by Perseverance rover. Source: NASA/JPL)
Mad props for including furlongs as unit of measure.
What’s that in Libraries of Congress? Or Olympic-sized swimming pools?
511.45 Egyptian royal cubits. (Another shameless plug for units: https://www.gnu.org/software/units/)
But ever since that whole Mars thing, NASA is an all-metric shop.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-01-mn-17288-story.html
If only America hadn’t failed on the swap to metric. I hate having imperial components in metric assemblies, and my brain is forever corrupted to think in inches and thou.
To convert cm to inchs, Multiply by 4, divide by 10 . Easy peasy, within 2%
So that’s 60029 furlongs per fortnight. If I am wrong please be gentle it’s early and it hurt my brain thinking in furlongs per fortnight.
I hoped they would include 8685.29 attoparsecs.
Maybe they feel it isn’t going to last much longer, so they’ve decided to hot rod it.
They were wrong the first time, why not the second. Heck, why not the third, fourth and umpteenth time? Id like an indestructable Mars helicopter
Getting / building one of those might not be too hard, but how are you gonna recreate a Mars environment?
This is great…..Mars is now Kitty Hawk 2. Now I can’t wait until Dragonfly takes it’s first flight on Titan.
Reminds me of the classic Disney movie “Rocket Man”!
“For the first time on Mars!”
https://youtu.be/ndj_dS4jImA?si=9GDIY8xhZ2gSjzL6
The Ingenuity helicopter technology demonstrator – it doesn’t just test what is involved in successfully operating a helicopter on Mars, it also demonstrates the successful use of inexpensive, vastly more powerful commercial off-the-shelf electronics there which will enable far more sophisticated AI in the future.
The avionics design is required to have low mass, low power and adequate radiation tolerance. A set of candidate parts to meet these requirements have been incorporated into the design which is now described.
The Snapdragon processor with a Linux operating system performs high-level functions on the helicopter. The Snapdragon processor has a 2.26 GHz Quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor with 2 GB Random Access Memory (RAM), 32 GB Flash memory, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART), a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), General Purpose Input/Ouput (GPIO), a 4000 pixel color camera, and a Video Graphics Array (VGA) black-and-white camera. This 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 Snapdragon 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. At any given time, one of the MCU is active with the other waiting to be hot-swapped in case of a fault. The MCU from Texas Instruments is a TMS570LC43x high-reliability automotive processor operating at 300 MHz, with 512 K RAM, 4 MB
flash memory, UART, SPI, GPIO.
The Snapdragon 801 is 2014 technology.
—————–
Perseverance rover
Processor:
Radiation-hardened central processor with PowerPC 750 Architecture: a BAE RAD 750
Operates at up to 200 megahertz speed, 10 times the speed in Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity’s computers
That’s 1997 tech because it’s radiation hardened which, among other measures, requires much greater feature size.
Memory:
2 gigabytes of flash memory (~8 times as much as Spirit or Opportunity)
256 megabytes of dynamic random access memory
256 kilobytes of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory
Flight 1: oh god oh crap guys what if something goes wrong, this thing is a million miles away, uggggh why didn’t we send two
Flight 62: LOL this time make it go even faster
I think this is awesome. Not because they are hot rodding it but because they can. I have nothing but awe for the team that built it. NASA should take note.
Pssst, driver, I built it with my own hands. Press ctrl+alt+shift+n three time to activate nitro for the copter. You have 4 seconds of bliss.
First off. NASA stole the name.
https://www.amazon.com/Flight-Dragonfly-Robert-L-Forward/dp/0671559370
Also. I’m fairly sure metric and standard are mixed use at the machine shop