Posted on 06/22/2021 5:43:17 PM PDT by Ezekiel
NASA's experimental Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, has now flown eight times on the Red Planet, traveling farther than scientists hoped would be possible.
The little chopper made its most recent Mars sortie on Monday (June 21). During the flight, Ingenuity remained aloft for 77.4 seconds, flew 525 feet (160 meters), and landed about 440 feet (133.5 m) away from its companion, the Perseverance rover, according to a tweet from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which operates the helicopter.
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Monday's flight came about two weeks after Ingenuity's previous flight, on June 8. The success of the new flight marks a second flawless flight for the helicopter after a difficult sixth flight that tested the chopper's resilience.
Although Ingenuity was originally designed to fly only five times, its steady successes encouraged the agency to extend its mission and experiment with more ambitious flights. Whereas the helicopter's early flights began and ended in the same place, dubbed Wright Brothers Field after pioneers of flight on Earth, Ingenuity is now soaring from one new airfield to another.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Ingenuity ping.
The author wrote "Ingenuity is now soaring from one new airfield to another." Rather pathetic a space author doesn't know the meaning of "soar." Helicopters don't soar.
8 helicopter flights? Landing in sand? Should be coming up on several scheduled maintenance inspections about now.
Great. We can send a helicopter to Mars but still cannot count ballots, secure our borders, balance the budget, determine where COVID originated, if masks and social distancing are effective, if Fauci and Biden are full of s#it, or the exact number of genders.
We need to get our priorities in order and a helicopter on Mars isn’t on the list.
They were going to test it out while the rover remained nearby by necessity, but if even if the helo didn’t break or crash, the rover was going to be moving on for its own mission.
They didn’t expect that the helicopter should do so well that it would be able to follow the rover and land at new sites.
With this lil’ “hovercraft” performing way beyond expectations, the author might have been taking dramatic license by using “soar” .
World problems will always be with us, but we won't always have a Marshelicopter to follow.
What factors were responsible for the five-flight lifetime? Overall battery life and recharge cycles (five cycle seems very low).
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This helicopter was intended only as a proof-of-concept so the engineers only scoped out a limited set of tests not knowing if it would encounter something unexpected. As it was, the 1st flight was delayed a bit as preflight checkout showed some anomalies. NASA engineers downloaded and updated the onboard software, then made the first successful flight.
Really is a neat bit of engineering.
Don’t know if you saw the video, but there was one flight where Perseverance had its microphone on during one of the helicopter’s flights. It’s incredible the sound carries in such a thin atmosphere. Ingenuity sounded like a really revved up leaf blower!
Who’s on Mars to perform the dailies?
You’ve got to figure that those little green men are griping about who’ll have to do the next wash.
:)
Did not see that video. Did you see the one where the tech guy (makes excellent videos) went to CalTech and interviewed the team? They had video and audio of the copter in the vacuum chamber. Sounded like a lot of angry hornets.
But the billion dollar toy made it over 1 minute.
Celebrate the use of math, physics and aeronautics.
We need shining examples of excellence.
it’s a grasshopper!
I remember them saying that they were going to “crash” it to study something or another (on the 5th flight?)..
Did they finally realize that they should keep it going as long as it was working?
You know it...lol
Wonder what the RPM of the rotors are? Not much atmosphere on Mars, 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Low gravity helps I would assume.
I believe they turn at around 25,000 RPM!
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