Mars Rover Perseverance Discussion Thread

[Flavio hc16]

ITS BACK!

 

 

Edited January 21 by Flavio hc16
Embedding glitch

[tater]

RIP (blade broke)

 

[tater]

 

[darthgently]

45 minutes ago, tater said:

This is kind an emotional moment actually.

[StrandedonEarth]

RIP Ingenuity. It's not actually dead, just crippled by a broken wing

From NASA Ingenuity helicopter mission on Mars ends after three years | CNN

Hmm, was that divot carved out by a hard landing (or the blade itself?), or was it pre-existing? And what is that blue speck in the middle of the divot?

E: It's so easy to imagine the comm dropping out as the equivalent of "Can't talk, trying to land in one piece!"

Edited January 25 by StrandedonEarth

[grawl]

I'll settle on the idea it has been struck by a meteor. A great ending at the level of the feats it accomplished.

 

I know it probably is something boring like fatigue on the material but... Don't break my dreams, OK ? 

[tater]

Blue pebbles are interesting.

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Hmm, was that divot carved out by a hard landing (or the blade itself?), or was it pre-existing? And what is that blue speck in the middle of the divot?

Good observation. See how the dark patch in the sand stretches outward away from Ingenuity? I think that's likely where the blade hit the dirt and scooped it up.

I wonder if Perseverance's microphone would have been able to pick that up...

[StrandedonEarth]

6 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Good observation. See how the dark patch in the sand stretches outward away from Ingenuity? I think that's likely where the blade hit the dirt and scooped it up.

I wonder if Perseverance's microphone would have been able to pick that up...

Good point, I didn't think it through that far.  Ingenuity can control itself without comms to Percy, right? Perhaps the comm blackout was a complete, albeit temporary, loss of power resulting in the crash / hard landing. Amazing it came to rest apparently upright in that case.

[darthgently]

3 hours ago, tater said:

Blue pebbles are interesting.

The impact has revealed blue Spice sands beneath the surface of Arrakis.  May thy blade chip and shatter

[Minmus Taster]

13 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

RIP Ingenuity. It's not actually dead, just crippled by a broken wing

From NASA Ingenuity helicopter mission on Mars ends after three years | CNN

Hmm, was that divot carved out by a hard landing (or the blade itself?), or was it pre-existing? And what is that blue speck in the middle of the divot?

E: It's so easy to imagine the comm dropping out as the equivalent of "Can't talk, trying to land in one piece!"

So is it actually dead or just incapable of flight? It was talked about previously that it was communicating with ground control, did they shut it off?

[Flavio hc16]

30 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

So is it actually dead or just incapable of flight? It was talked about previously that it was communicating with ground control, did they shut it off?

Incapable of controlled flight .

 

 

Edited January 26 by Flavio hc16

[tater]

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/now-that-weve-flown-on-mars-what-comes-next-in-aerial-planetary-exploration/

Quote

In another, arguably more important way, Ingenuity may forever change the way NASA, other space agencies, and eventually private companies explore and settle the Solar System. The program did so by using commercial, off-the-shelf parts.

The scientists and engineers who built the helicopter had no choice. Flying on Mars is incredibly demanding. The air is so thin it is equivalent to flying at an elevation of 80,000 feet on Earth, or three times higher than the peak of Mount Everest. Helicopters on Earth can max out at an altitude of about 25,000 feet before the air is too thin to support the rotation of their blades. So to meet the demands of Mars, Ingenuity's designers had to be ruthless in their choices. They could not afford the mass of radiation-hardened components, like for batteries and computers.

So they bought commercially available parts and rolled the dice—with astonishing results. Many NASA missions will never be the same.

 

Quote

Tzanetos said Ingenuity uses a 2015-era smartphone computer chip, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It has a mass of half an ounce.

Vs the 1 lb radhard computer in all other JPL probes...

Quote

"The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined," Tzanetos said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power that has flown on NASA's big missions beyond Earth orbit, from Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.

 

[tater]

 

[kerbiloid]

On 1/26/2024 at 3:31 PM, Minmus Taster said:

So is it actually dead or just incapable of flight?

Able to crawl, helping with remaining blades.

A crawlicopter.

[PakledHostage]

I saw on NASA's Perseverance mission page that they've named the site where Ingenuity's mission ended “Valinor Hills”, from Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings. It's a fitting tribute. As is written in the  Wikipedia article about Valinor: The Valinor Hills are on the continent of Aman. Aman is known as "the Undying Lands", but the land itself does not cause mortals to live forever. However, only immortal beings are generally allowed to reside there.

Edited February 11 by PakledHostage

[darthgently]

This is an excellent read about the hazardous path  Ingenuity  navigated prior to the actual mission

 

 

 

[Minmus Taster]

Ingenuity's blades are totally shattered, there's at least one that was spotted 15 meters away from the drone. RIP to a real one 

[StrandedonEarth]

So now it’s a litterbug….

[PakledHostage]

Do they have any idea yet how it might have ended up like that?

[grawl]

3 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

Do they have any idea yet how it might have ended up like that?

The perspective is hard to tell, but it looks like its legs hit a small sand ridge (the 2 darker bits that-looks-like holes in the sand),  effectively stopping its motion abruptly, then it bounced back a bit to finally settle.

What do you think about it ?

 

 

And now, did the broken propeller :

A. Broke when the vehicle tipped over while trying to land at that sand ridge ?

B. Disassembled in mid-air for an unknown reason, messing up the trajectory and causing it to land in an unexpected way ?

C. The answer C 

Edited February 26 by grawl
wording & formatting