Kawasaki Concours Forum
Mish mash => Open Forum => Topic started by: Conrad on February 14, 2021, 07:09:52 AM
-
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/first-space-helicopter-set-take-martian-skies-n1257617
(https://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2021_05/3447667/210204-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-al-1316_ae8f8cd1600f72c35d8668497a713388.fit-2000w.jpg)
When NASA's Perseverance rover touches down next week, it will carry one of the strangest devices ever seen on Mars — a drone destined to make the first controlled flights on an extraterrestrial planet.
Dubbed “Ingenuity,” the drone weighs just 4 pounds, and it will stay stored beneath the rover’s belly while Perseverance runs through its initial surface checks and experiments.
But about the middle of April, the rover will scout out a flat area without large rocks to deploy the drone, and soon after that Perseverance will release Ingenuity to make the first flights on Mars.
“It's pretty unique in that it's a helicopter that can fly around,” said Tim Canham, the operations lead for the Ingenuity project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
“There was a balloon mission on Venus years ago, so we can't claim to be the first aircraft,” he said, referring to the two Soviet Vega space probes that deployed balloons attached to scientific instruments in the clouds on Venus in 1985. “But we can claim we’re the first powered aircraft outside Earth.”
Canham will coordinate the five test flights scheduled for the Ingenuity drone over 30 days, with each at least three days apart.
“The first flight will be very basic – it will just go straight up, hover and go straight down,” he said. “After that, we’ll do a couple of flights where we go horizontally, to test how it works.”
The car-size Perseverance rover has seven complex scientific instruments, so it can take panoramic video, monitor the weather, perform ultraviolet and X-ray spectroscopy on anything it finds, and look for signs of ancient microbial life.
But, Ingenuity will carry out no science on its test flights. It will only take photographs of the Martian terrain with its two cameras, one facing forward and one down.
Instead, the Ingenuity project is designed to show drones can be an important addition to the ongoing explorations of distant planets, Canham said.
“Our job is really to prove that the aerodynamics, as we've tested them here, work also on Mars," he said.
Mars is a hard place to fly, which is why Ingenuity weighs so little and needs two counter-rotating 4-foot-long helicopter rotors to stay aloft.
Although the gravity of Mars is just a third of that of Earth, the red planet has a very thin atmosphere with just 1 percent the pressure of Earth, which makes flying difficult.
Mars is also freezing cold – it gets down to minus 100 Fahrenheit at night in the giant Jezero crater where the rover will land, perhaps rising as high as 40 degrees during the day. The extreme conditions will test the drone’s design.
Canham explained that Ingenuity only has enough battery power so that each of its test flights can last up to 90 seconds, in which time it should fly about 330 feet.
Sensors will monitor aspects such as the drone’s altitude, movements, aerodynamic performance and how it reacts to gusts of wind.
The cold will also affect Ingenuity’s lithium-ion batteries, so keeping the drone warm overnight while recharging from its solar panels during the day is a big part of the project, Canham said.
“We have these 90-second flights, but then a lot of the time is spent running the heater,” he said. “I joke that we are a heater that occasionally flies.”
The concept of using drones on robot probes to explore the solar system is relatively new, and this is unlikely to be the last flight on another planet or moon.
NASA is already planning a more complex helicopter drone for Mars, and the proposed Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan would launch in the late 2020s. It would deploy an entire drone helicopter probe equipped with scientific instruments in the thick but unbreathable atmosphere there, where it is much easier to fly than on Mars.
Planetary scientist Lori Fenton of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) in California, who studies sand dunes on Mars and the challenges for robot Mars rovers, said she remembered a scientific proposal 12 years ago that suggested using a drone to study a field site somewhere in the western United States.
“[Some] panel members thought it was absurd that someone was requesting funding to use a ‘toy’ to do science,” she said. “Since then, the UAV industry has exploded, and here we are — about to land a drone on Mars that will do exactly the sort of reconnaissance that the review panel laughed at,” she said, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles.
-
Lets just hope that the drone doesn't discover any Martians with 12 gauge shotguns..
-
I didn't realize it was so cold there. Guess I had forgotten.
Interesting idea with the drone. Could cover a bigger area if the air was thicker.
Ride safe, Ted
-
https://youtu.be/fJIgcihiw2Y
-
90 sec flight. Wow. No room for pilot errors.
-
I didn't realize it was so cold there. Guess I had forgotten.
Interesting idea with the drone. Could cover a bigger area if the air was thicker.
Ride safe, Ted
How so?
-
Probably the props would take less power for the same amount of lift, therefore increasing time in the air. Colder air is denser air which also could increase lift. Unfortunately the batteries don't like cold temps.
-
Probably the props would take less power for the same amount of lift, therefore increasing time in the air.
I understand this, of course. But I'm pretty sure that the engineers responsible for the design would have taken this into consideration.
In addition to this, Mar's gravity is ~0.375 that of Earth, so the drone would be able to travel farther, with respect to weight, than it would on Earth.
-
Then why only 90 seconds of flight time?
-
The low 3.7m/s² g helps, but the 6mbar (0.6% of Earth sea-level) pressure at the surface means you need large area props to shift enough air to generate the thrust needed. Luckily the speed of sound is way lower in such low pressure so they don't have to worry about supersonic shockwaves at the rotor tips.
Here it is being tested in a vacuum chamber under earth G (9.81m/s²) but close to Mars air pressure.
Sure is a noisy beyotch! :rotflmao:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flAFvfkIKDs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flAFvfkIKDs)
On Mars it shouldn't need anywhere near those RPMs to fly.
-
They aren't going to be able to control it in flight considering how much fly time it has and the lag in communications between Earth and Mars. Must be some significant AI on board. They'll have to program the flight and then hope it comes back like it should.
-
They aren't going to be able to control it in flight considering how much fly time it has and the lag in communications between Earth and Mars. Must be some significant AI on board. They'll have to program the flight and then hope it comes back like it should.
That's exactly why these are test flights. Can it position itself where it is told to and can it maintain that position despite gusts of wind, not that those gusts are going to be able to do much in such low density atmosphere. Test one I believe is straight up, maintain position, and then land close to the take-off spot. If that works, then other test flights will be undertaken once it has recharged itself.
The current communication delay with Mars is around 14 minutes, so direct control of anything is impossible.
-
I was suggesting the drone could cover more area "than the Rover" in less time.
Plus the altitude of the Drone helps. The height would allow them to spot routes for the Rover to use.
So, Even (only) 90 seconds would greatly widen their area of operation.
Sed "Could cover a bigger area if the air was thicker", because thicker air would allow more lift..
Ride safe, Ted
-
I see that the Rover has landed safely. Photo's are already being sent. First are not very clear but show a good landscape for the Rover to begin it's exploration.
NOTE: After lens covers are removed, pictures will improve.
Ride safe, Ted