One of the things I find really cool about Ingenuity is how it is in large based on consumer hardware. The main processor is a Snapdragon 801 running Linux which communicates with Perseverance using the Zigbee protocol [1]. Perseverance on the other hand uses a RAD750 from 2001! If successful I hope this can lead to more modern hardware for these kinds of missions in general.
As the name RAD750 indicates, that processor is designed to be radiation hardened which matters for longer missions. I doubt the Snapdragon 801 will survive as long or have as few errors but it also doesn't matter since Ingenuity isn't aimed for long term usage.
It’s less about longevity and more about reducing errors. Interestingly, Ingenuity has some sort of watchdog that can reset the Snapdragon in-flight fast enough to recover if there is an error.
What I imagine for long lived and high-cost missions is using some sort of co-processor setup with a radiation hardened processor and a faster and more modern processor. These rovers run a lot of computer vision algorithms and I believe more powerful hardware would be quite useful. They may already do something like this, however my understanding is that there is a lot of skepticism in integrating these less fault-tolerant processors. Ingenuity could help remove some of the skepticism and lead to more systems like this in the future.
One thing that's not clear to me is what the radiation is like on mars. Mars has an atmosphere, but no magnetic field.
Is it like the situation high in earth's atmosphere (like using your ipad on a commercial flight), or would it be more like on the moon with no protection?
They work better primarily because they had previously invested in the tooling to rad-harden them and it’s really expensive to do that again one time for each mission; cheaper to rely on already-rad-hardened designs.
These projects also have long development periods, they want to be sure everything works so they can't just sub things out at the last minute. So you end up with a system using 10 year old tech.
If you were to build the exact same helicopter here based on those parts what would be the cost vs what’s the device on Mars cost? Also, I know plenty of solid engineers who I could build one thing based on that, obviously not taking atmosphere and G-forces into account to get there.
Also Linus finally got his progeny to Mars. That’s a pretty cool accomplishment:
“What have you built?”
Well, I invented one of the most prolific operating systems the world has ever seen, but not just this world - there is a helicopter on Mars that is flying due to the seeds which I planted that day...”
It's not just atmosphere and g-forces. The cold temperatures mean the helicopter spends 2/3 of its battery power keeping the batteries and electronics from freezing.
One of the fascinating things about space silicon is that NASA spends many years hardening specific processors to withstand the types of shocks and electromagnetic interference from space travel. These intensive processes mean that the equipment they can use is always 10-20 years behind the modern equivalents.
Aren't smaller transistor sizes also more susceptible to radiation issues which means you can't really use newer processors without ever more effort in radiation hardening?
The CPU will probably be destroyed by radiation before long. I'd guess the key factors here were weight, power draw, size and perhaps performance. A radiation-hardened CPU probably didn't fit the bill. It's also super expensive.
Any individual part is peanuts compared to overall mission cost. Anyway, it’s a great PR stunt for QCOM. It’s not that big secret, that cubesats successfully use automotive grade off shelf parts.
absolutely performance. Yes to the other three for sure, but the engineers reported that there was no way they were running flight control using image tracking on a 200MHz CPU.
It seems other parts are more modern. Yes, the main processor is a RAD750, but the peripherals can use modern components and there's some USB and Ethernet here and there (like the cable between the sky crane and the rover)
Reliability is very important and space is harsh. I assume on the surface the radiation levels are low enough for Earth systems to work (maybe playing a bit with voltage/clock frequency helps, not sure how much shielding they can add, probably not too much).
The problem is that NASA is designed around long term and expensive projects.
At one point, a fast iterating company like space-x will surpass their achievements.
Why would SpaceX bother doing science, though? If you imagine a project like Voyager, you might think they just dump the data and "go home" (not quite, obviously) but to analyse the data and to know what to look for they had to hire geologists and meteorologists (for example) along with the planetary scientists and co.
NASA should be about long term and expensive projects, SpaceX is just a tool to achieve that goal which is to do new science regardless of whether it is in the air or in space.
Fun fact: This is not the first time a space program has flown on another planet. The Soviets launched weather balloons on Venus during the Venera missions [1]
And given the density of Venus' atmosphere, here is a fun thought experiment.
It may be possible to make 'titanium' balloons for longer term operation. The would work by creating the balloon envelope on earth, have a sealing mechanism that you activated in orbit so they had vacuum inside. And then drop them into the atmosphere.
Same idea a glass floats on fishing nets[1] except with titanium (so they can withstand the compression forces given they have a vacuum inside). It might be useful/necessary to put some additional structure inside the envelope for strength but like eggs, the sphere is a pretty good shape for distributing compressive force.
Anyway, put a number of them on tethers attached to the instrument payload and drop it off into the atmosphere once you've gone trans-sonic with parachutes or retro rockets. The platform will then fall to the point where the lifting force of the floats is equal to the weight of the platform.
Ideally the titanium would be impervious to the atmospherics's corrosive effects.
Venus’s atmosphere is 100x denser than earth’s, so you could just seal the metal balloons at sea level pressure and it wouldn’t really make a difference. Or you could seal them in a vacuum on earth. Not sure why you would need to feel them in space.
If we understand "flight" as being the use of a wing to generate lift in an atmosphere, then I think we can safely say this is the first time we have flown on another planet. I assume this little helicopter actually has rotary wings rather than fans.
If we're splitting hairs then the lack of control seems like a better criterion to distinguish the two. If you ask me there's no reason a zeppelin would be inherently less 'flighty' than a helicopter.
The term used in the article was “powered flight”. This distinction is relevant in the history of aviation on earth as well, and usually that term is used.
For sure the soviets did some neat science work but I think a motorized helicopters flying on Mars is pretty darn cool too compared to a ballon floating in a dense atmosphere it even feels like an advancement
It's actually not even the first time a powered aircraft has flown on Mars. Both Curiosity's and Perseverance's descent stages were powered aircraft that, after releasing the rovers, flew up and away from them in a controlled manner through the air.
A solar drone that takes hours to charge and flies only a minute at a time is barely an aircraft too. Don't get me wrong, it's a very cool tech demo and I can't wait to see the video, but IMO if your goal is to take pressure/composition measurements in the atmosphere at a variety of altitudes, a weather balloon is the right tool for the job.
I didn't realise it was so large (1.8 kg, 1.2 m diameter rotors). I suppose it has to have the large rotors to be able to generate lift in the thin atmosphere, 1/160th of the density [edit: pressure, not density - thanks Robotbeat] of the earth's atmosphere at sea level according to the article.
Turns out it’s not quite so bad. 1/160th the pressure doesn’t mean 1/160th density because CO2 is denser for the same pressure, especially Martian temperatures. And Jezero crater is much lower than Mars “sea level.”
This apparently also introduces some serious control issues - with propellers that long and massive, there's substantial lag between control inputs and flight changes. In ground tests in pressure chambers, it was difficult-to-impossible to manually pilot the thing, and even under computer control it's very clearly shakier than Earth-atmosphere drones.
Wow, I never realized it might be 160 times harder to get off the ground on Mars. Perhaps lower gravity helps on the other hand, though the difference definitely seems way lower (please correct me if my physics is wrong).
>One of the most significant obstacles for landing on Mars will continue to present problems for our heroic helicopter now that it is safely on the surface. The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars is only about 1% that of Earth. To put that in perspective, the summit of Mount Everest has only one-third the atmospheric pressure of sea level. While this is thought to be at (or sadly in some cases beyond) the limit of what humans can survive, it is well beyond Earthbound helicopters’ range. If you’ve ever wondered why wealthy explorer-types don’t just cheat and take a helicopter to the summit of Everest, that’s why!
Ummm... actually:
>On June 21, 1972, Jean Boulet of France piloted an Aérospatiale SA 315B Lama helicopter to an absolute altitude record of 40,814 feet (12,440 m).[60] At that extreme altitude, the engine flamed out and Boulet had to land the helicopter by breaking another record: the longest successful autorotation in history.[61] The helicopter was stripped of all unnecessary equipment prior to the flight to minimize weight, and the pilot breathed supplemental oxygen.
>The record was broken on March 23, 2002 by Fred North. North achieved an altitude of 42,500 feet (12,954 m) in a Eurocopter AS350 B2.
It should be clear that while Eurocopter and Aerospatiale before them liked showing off specific modified helicopters in the Himalayas (up to and including landing on Everest), none of them were capable of carrying a useful payload to that altitude. Helicopter altitude records are much like zoom-climb records in jet aircraft - yes, you can reach those altitudes, but not for long and not while doing anything else.
I am incredibly excited for this. Can believe how nervous the control engineers must be for this. Not sure what quality of the footage to expect from this.
I was also excited about it, however an article critical of various points of Mars 2020 damped this quite a bit [1 (in German)]: Does the drone actually have any scientific relevance? I'm even doubtful it answers relevant engineering questions. I mean, it was tested in a pressure chamber already simulating mars atmosphere and gravity, we know it will work. The only question seems to be: Will it fail because of some engineering oversight or hardware failure, or not? There seem to be no scientific sensors on it at all. This 'commodity hardware test' could also be done with just the processor and monitoring, without the helicopter part. Looking at it like this it seems like mostly a toy or PR stunt, but one that takes $80M and space on the rover away from scientific projects.
I do not agree at all that it is not useful but even if true the PR in itself is likely worth it, both for getting more attention to NASA (IE. budgeting) and for sparking ideas and dreams.
Sadly, this helicopter won't record any footage, it is only meant to test flight control and to proof that the idea will work for future missions. There is a interesting Veritasium episode (youtube) that talks about this (interviewing the actual designer from the JPL). The only footage will be from Perseverance filming the flight.
This is not correct, there are multiple downward facing cameras [a]:
1) Navigation (NAV) Camera. This is a global-shutter, nadir pointed grayscale 640 by 480 pixel sensor (Omnivision
OV7251) mounted to a Sunny optics module. It has a field-of-view (FOV) of 133 deg (horizontal) by 100 deg (vertical) with an average Instantaneous Field-of-view (IFOV) of 3.6 mRad/pixel, and is capable of acquiring images at 10 frames/sec. Visual features are extracted from the images and tracked from frame to frame to provide a velocity estimate.
2) Return-to-Earth (RTE) Camera. This is a rolling shutter, high-resolution 4208 by 3120 pixel sensor (Sony IMX 214) with a Bayer color filter array mated with an O-film optics module. This camera has a FOV of 47 deg (horizontal) by 47 deg (vertical) with an average IFOV of 0.26 mRad/pixel.
> Its payload is a high resolution downward-looking camera for navigation, landing, and science surveying of the terrain, and a communication system to relay data to the Perseverance rover.
I wish we could fund NASA more, make it more risk tolerant, more agile, and more efficient. The Titan boat drone to explore the lakes, last I heard, couldn't be scoped due to resources. Working there requires great patience.
> I wish we could fund NASA more, make it more risk tolerant, more agile, and more efficient. The Titan boat drone to explore the lakes, last I heard, couldn't be scoped due to resources. Working there requires great patience.
I wonder if funding NASA more would mean that the "inventive" ideas get reduced. The limitation of NASA's funding has meant that they've produced ideas and technologies to cover that shortfall in even cheaper ways than possible before, and that might be reduced with a much large budget.
I believe so. Funding competitors would likely yield better results, unless one is looking for US results versus results overall of course. A lot of very exciting missions are from other space agencies these days, which is great!
I haven't seen anything on specific timing but I read they will be looking suitable terrain (flat with no large dangerous rocks, but enough small rocks for the helicopter's vision system to register) to fly in as the rover drives. There's also no provision for the rover to pick the helicopter back up as far as I know, so they will be stuck in the same place during the 30 day test campaign. Given that and given the "proof of concept" nature of the helicopter I imagine there might be a desire to start getting data back from the rover's main scientific instruments before deploying the helicopter.
Readit News
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)
Is it like the situation high in earth's atmosphere (like using your ipad on a commercial flight), or would it be more like on the moon with no protection?
I hope they installed the Home Assistant Core docker container on Perseverance. Gotta get those sweet dashboards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening
That's why they don't use the latest and greatest in the space.
Will be interesting when missions are being launched utilising the tech of today, like rad hardened neuromorphic chips https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200902005406/en/Bra...
Also Linus finally got his progeny to Mars. That’s a pretty cool accomplishment:
“What have you built?”
Well, I invented one of the most prolific operating systems the world has ever seen, but not just this world - there is a helicopter on Mars that is flying due to the seeds which I planted that day...”
What have you built?
Good rundown of how it was built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM
absolutely performance. Yes to the other three for sure, but the engineers reported that there was no way they were running flight control using image tracking on a 200MHz CPU.
Reliability is very important and space is harsh. I assume on the surface the radiation levels are low enough for Earth systems to work (maybe playing a bit with voltage/clock frequency helps, not sure how much shielding they can add, probably not too much).
NASA should be about long term and expensive projects, SpaceX is just a tool to achieve that goal which is to do new science regardless of whether it is in the air or in space.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon
It may be possible to make 'titanium' balloons for longer term operation. The would work by creating the balloon envelope on earth, have a sealing mechanism that you activated in orbit so they had vacuum inside. And then drop them into the atmosphere.
Same idea a glass floats on fishing nets[1] except with titanium (so they can withstand the compression forces given they have a vacuum inside). It might be useful/necessary to put some additional structure inside the envelope for strength but like eggs, the sphere is a pretty good shape for distributing compressive force.
Anyway, put a number of them on tethers attached to the instrument payload and drop it off into the atmosphere once you've gone trans-sonic with parachutes or retro rockets. The platform will then fall to the point where the lifting force of the floats is equal to the weight of the platform.
Ideally the titanium would be impervious to the atmospherics's corrosive effects.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_float
That’d be pretty cool!
How huge would it have to be? Would it have to be made of titanium? Aluminum? Stainless steel?
How good are those materials at withstanding a vacuum (or partial vacuum) if the diameter was say... 50m?
I feel like at some size it must work, as the volume of air displaced goes up with r^3 and the surface area of metal only goes up with r^2.
If people here can do the math, maybe I could build one in time for next burning man...!
Speaking of flight and picking the nits here — looks like Wikipedia also isn‘t completely correct here:
> It is planned to make the first powered flight on any planet beyond Earth
...arguably the first _powered_ flights were done by the sky cranes of Opportunity and Perseverance
Not the Apollo 11 lunar module? In contrast to the sky cranes it actually lifted off again.
But Flight? A rocket has no fixed or rotating wing providing lift, so maybe not.
The first flight was in 1903, not 300 BC China when they used sky lanterns.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/12/us/soviet-drops-weather-b...
Deleted Comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM
Working on this stuff must be _very_ rewarding (assuming that the payloads land in one piece!).
I didn't realise it was so large (1.8 kg, 1.2 m diameter rotors). I suppose it has to have the large rotors to be able to generate lift in the thin atmosphere, 1/160th of the density [edit: pressure, not density - thanks Robotbeat] of the earth's atmosphere at sea level according to the article.
Ummm... actually:
>On June 21, 1972, Jean Boulet of France piloted an Aérospatiale SA 315B Lama helicopter to an absolute altitude record of 40,814 feet (12,440 m).[60] At that extreme altitude, the engine flamed out and Boulet had to land the helicopter by breaking another record: the longest successful autorotation in history.[61] The helicopter was stripped of all unnecessary equipment prior to the flight to minimize weight, and the pilot breathed supplemental oxygen.
>The record was broken on March 23, 2002 by Fred North. North achieved an altitude of 42,500 feet (12,954 m) in a Eurocopter AS350 B2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_altitude_record
Also: Mount Everest AS350 B3 landing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXNXSvnCtKA
Some current records. https://pilotteacher.com/how-high-can-you-go-in-a-helicopter...
[1] https://www.golem.de/news/perseverance-diese-marsmission-hat...
1) Navigation (NAV) Camera. This is a global-shutter, nadir pointed grayscale 640 by 480 pixel sensor (Omnivision OV7251) mounted to a Sunny optics module. It has a field-of-view (FOV) of 133 deg (horizontal) by 100 deg (vertical) with an average Instantaneous Field-of-view (IFOV) of 3.6 mRad/pixel, and is capable of acquiring images at 10 frames/sec. Visual features are extracted from the images and tracked from frame to frame to provide a velocity estimate.
2) Return-to-Earth (RTE) Camera. This is a rolling shutter, high-resolution 4208 by 3120 pixel sensor (Sony IMX 214) with a Bayer color filter array mated with an O-film optics module. This camera has a FOV of 47 deg (horizontal) by 47 deg (vertical) with an average IFOV of 0.26 mRad/pixel.
[a]https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/46229/CL%2317...
> Its payload is a high resolution downward-looking camera for navigation, landing, and science surveying of the terrain, and a communication system to relay data to the Perseverance rover.
(From Wikipedia)
Also: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25526/bottom-of-ingenuity-ma...
I'm pretty sure the point of the helicopter, other than to test powered flight, is to capture frames.
https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25526/bottom-of-ingenuity-ma...
Deleted Comment
I'm even more excited for the Dragonfly mission with a flying drone on Titan, but that's a long time to wait: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(spacecraft)
I wish we could fund NASA more, make it more risk tolerant, more agile, and more efficient. The Titan boat drone to explore the lakes, last I heard, couldn't be scoped due to resources. Working there requires great patience.
I wonder if funding NASA more would mean that the "inventive" ideas get reduced. The limitation of NASA's funding has meant that they've produced ideas and technologies to cover that shortfall in even cheaper ways than possible before, and that might be reduced with a much large budget.
Tomorrow, days, weeks?