the engineering team commanded Perseverance to halt all of its ongoing science activities for a full day to essentially sit there and listen intently for Ingenuity's call
That sounds like a nerve-racking bit of troubleshooting!
> But recently, the small, automated helicopter has had problems with dust accumulating on its solar panels, NASA says. This dust reduces the ability of the vehicle to recharge its six lithium-ion batteries.
IIRC, this dust-on-solar-panels problem has been a serious threat to all the Mars rover missions. I wouldn't make sense on a helicopter, but it seems it would be smart to include some kind of emergency-use brush to clean it from the panels as a last-ditch solution on a rover. Especially considering how greatly-"extended" missions seem de rigueur for NASA.
When reading up on this, the commonly discussed point is that they expected other parts to fail a lot before the panels are covered in dust. Although I've never found an "official" rationale
Modern rovers just use RTGs and avoid the problem all together. Ingenuity couldn't and had to use solar panels but was mostly planned as a test craft so the accumulation problem would happen long after it achieved it's mission goals so it wouldn't cause a mission failure.
All of the rovers start with a fairly small mission and it gets extended as it provides good science and congress/NASA finds money to continue to staff the support teams and get time on the Deep Space Network.
This was the first ever exoplanet helicopter, I think they were only 50-50 on whether it would work at all, with a very high risk of some other issue crashing it first.
Not for Curiosity and Perseverance, which use RTGs. NASA like RTGs for their big, power-hungry vehicles, and use solar panels on the smaller ones. I guess that one problem is that any brush or compressed air mechanism would have to be particularly light to justify itself, else you might as well design around an RTG instead of solar panels.
Rotorcraft are a special case though, because they come with powerful fans attached. Maybe the next rotorcraft will have a way to direct its prop wash over its solar panels.
I always wanted to get Oakely tearoffs for riding dirtbikes as a kid, but i had to put all of my money into keeping the thing running. xD
I imagine there are people on this planet that could spend an entire day transfixing you with a conversation on the physical phenomena of dust collecting on solar panels on Mars. Why it happens, what's unique about the environment, what isn't. What's been tried, what will be tried next, why the current configuration was chosen vs others that might have better or worse results, what breakthroughs in materials science might make the whole thing go away, etc etc etc.
Aircraft on Mars are obviously always going to be very weight constrained. I wonder if some of the microwave power transfer tech could be used to reduce the cycle time and help in situations like this. Maybe when we can start getting multi kW generators and/or fixed solar arrays on the planet it will start to make more sense.
The tricky part is the helicopter is already one the edge of being able to fly because of the thin atmosphere and that would put more weight and it would be up high above the rotors.
Kind of like how Martians have enormous lower lips, which when they're startled, they can extend out in front of themselves and thrust up into the air, to hide their big
eyes behind.
Perseverance uses an RTG (something like 100 watts of power + heat), which is heavy but extremely reliable.
For an experimental helicopter that must fly around, Ingenuity's mass budget is extremely tight. I don't know how they'd put something on the helicopter, and I imagine it's considered far too risky to have the rover have some way of cleaning the helicopter.
It's a helicopter. It basically has an onboard vibrator. Park it at an angle and spin blades until you find a resonance and then leg gravity do the rest. I'm sure there's some very specific reason this "doesn't work".
Or just hope the vehicle's flight envelope is wider than the "dust's ability to stick to the panel" envelope. You're gonna lose the vehicle either way so why not try it.
I think part of the problem is that the kind of people who have a lot of experience solving these kinds of problems don't really have career paths that intersect with NASA so the engineers spec'ing out the vehicle don't really know with good enough levels of certainty when they can make cheap minor tweaks to the design of the vehicle that will produce some secondary positive result. And you can't go just call up the professional specialists and ask for their input because the processes involved are too bloated and would cost too much money to invoke over small secondary features so you really need that kind of expertise in house or not at all.
Yeah, I really don't understand why they don't include a shaker motor to vibrate the particles off the panels .. I mean I can guess that its just one more part to throw at a very, very expensive BOM already, but it seems to me that there must be some resonant frequency, well known through tests already, that would shake the panels just so that they become functional again ..
I doubt they would add another part (which takes mass, space, and testing) to solve a problem that is far, far outside the scope of the helicopter's designed mission.
My understanding is that the dust is incredibly sticky. You can't "just" vibrate it off. Even the occasional dust storm only blows some of it off. It's electrostatically attracted to the panels I think
That makes sense .. but I'm guessing they have to solve the problem sooner or later anyway, I don't see how a Mars colony is going to get over this problem unless of course we ship all those useful telephone dusters up there ..
IIRC it _has_ shaken off dust, but it obviously can't remove all of the dust, and even a little accumulation can reduce solar panel effectiveness enough to be a problem when you're on a pretty thin margin.
My opinion is that since they already have to use motors to unfold the panels on rovers, why not spend the extra mass to let the motors go both ways? Folding the motors halfway back up would remove the majority of the dust on a rover like Spirit/Opportunity.
I'm not sure how "sticky" the dust on Mars is. On Earth most dust (obviously very different composition) doesn't just fall off on its own when you tilt a surface sideways, you have to wipe it off applying some pressure.
There has been some work recently on electrostatic repulsion for cleaning dust from terrestrial panels. I expect NASA will investigate if the same technology is suitable for other planets.
Such a great story about ingenuity completely shooting past all that we thought it would be able to achieve. I also like the usage of plucky to describe it. Against all odds...
I hope Ingenuity can survive the Martian winter, but even if it does not, it has been a massively successful mission. Everybody who contributed to it must be incredibly proud of how well it has done!
Just getting (relative) closeups of the discarded landing stuff will probably improve reliability of the next missions all on its own. Knowing what broke, what didn't, how it broke, etc means they can hopefully allow for narrower tolerances and fewer redundances to pack more stuff into the science mission. The next helicopter can check up on its predecessor's remains to make its successor even better.
It's very expensive to send a science mission to check on the remains of a previous mission. Odds are the next helicopter will be sent somewhere far away from the original.
Wow, that's really banged up! Wasn't that the thing the parachute was attached to? I would have thought that with a parachute the landing would be softer.
Oh wait, Mars is almost a vacuum and the parachute is really just used to slow the lander as it's traveling at ridiculous speeds. Now I wonder what the terminal velocity was-- certainly higher than it would be on Earth, even with 1/3 the gravity?
I wonder if there are good pics of the part of the delivery system that used rockets and didn't have a parachute? Did it fare worse?
Mars's lower gravity, lower-density atmosphere, and different speed of sound (atmosphere mixture & temperature) happen to combine to similar aerodynamics in the high-subsonic region as the stratospheric region around 40 km altitude on Earth.
I.e., a plane that can fly up there on Earth could fly on Mars at low altitude.
Because gravity times travel distance is constant for constant aerodynamic efficiency and constant engine ISP, and Mars is both smaller than Earth and has significantly lower gravity, a hydrolox fuel-cell (driving electric props) flying wing should be able to do a "half-way around the planet" trip with reasonable cargo, followed by re-fueling oxygen, and flying back to the other place, before running out of hydrogen.
(Alternatively, at less than 50% cargo capacity loss, it could collect the water exhaust from the fuel cell, to recover the hydrogen.)
The main issue of such a plane would be that the lift-off speed on the runway would be about half the speed of sound. Maybe use the electric motors to drive fuel pumps and run hydrolox rocket engines for lift-off? Sounds like that could allow VTOL.
The amount of absolutely insane engineering that happens on these mission is outstanding all on its own- then you go and add stunts like this, and it makes you realize something: The folks doing this stuff are just like the rest of us. They're hackers, but they have billion dollar stuff to hack on. And, they're likely far better at it than the rest of us. Still, we're cut from the same cloth. Love it.
Why is it whenever someone says something unifying and wholesome like gp, someone like you isn't too far behind to remind everyone to feel bad about themselves?
Yep. Not to mention it's objectively not true: I worked at NASA for years, most people working there aren't rich, it pays less than most other engineering jobs. One of my parents worked there and we weren't rich when I was growing up. Nobody was paying for private schools or tutors or things... I had a stack of cheap books from a used bookstore and a handful of surplus nonworking computers that would have been thrown out.
> I had a stack of cheap books from a used bookstore and a handful of surplus nonworking computers that would have been thrown out.
And a parent who worked an NASA.
I agree I don't think excessive privilege is responsible for success in technical fields. But it sure doesn't hurt to have friends or family members already on the inside.
Of course, that is definitely how I got that first job. But I know plenty of people who got engineering jobs without parental help, and also plenty of people born into privilege who didn't make it as engineers even with the help.
The idea that the only way to get here is to start rich is just wrong, and offensive to those of us who didn't. You don't need rich parents, and there's no royal road to tech if you have 'em.
A parent working at NASA is a great advantage for entering tech not because they could open a door for you, but because they would help you creating a receptive mindset much before you'd actually start reading books. Or maybe it wasn't the case for you, but it definitely was for me. My father is a programmer, my mother a maths teacher. My mother's parents both were maths teacher, at different school levels. You can guess it was easy for me to have mathematical and computer concepts presented and explained every time I fancied them. I could develop and nurture my love for STEM much before it was a matter of actually reading books on my own.
It's not mechanical, of course; my sister never particularly enjoyed maths and went on to become a nurse. That's fine, of course; but clearly the road would have been harder for me if I wasn't born in an environment which valued maths and science as naturally interesting.
My mother's siblings have all finished the university, and so have my cousins on my mother's side (or are still going to the university). Among my father's siblings, he's the only one who finished the university, and coincidentally of my cousins on my father's side the only who finished university are my siblings and I. Of course I don't pretend this is statistically significant, but I think the real privilege with culture is not the money or somebody who makes it easier for you to get a job, but rather being born in an environment that stimulates your desire for culture.
Other than general supportiveness of my interests, neither of my parents were in a position to do that. There are a lot of things where, if I had had someone knowledgeable sit down with me for an afternoon, I'd have been years ahead of where I'm at. I could have learned Pascal or C about five years earlier than I did, if someone had helped me set up Turbo Pascal and write a hello-world in it. Could have been breadboarding things earlier if I had known some basics like "which holes are connected in a breadboard."
I really did just figure out most things on my own, through trial and error or old books. In an environment where most people either didn't care what I did or actively discouraged that kind of experimentation. Which is why I don't have a lot of patience for that argument up there: no, it's not privilege, anyone can do it, just most people don't.
I did just that. A screwdriver was my soldering iron, I recycled the solder and the rest of the parts from circuit boards salvaged from old electronics found in the garbage. Electronics can be as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be, and there is a small chance that you will learn faster at the ultra-cheap end because you are essentially reverse engineering all kinds of stuff.
At some point you need tools like an oscilloscope and back then it was out of reach. You can hack away basic stuff, sure, but it's not really possible to do more advanced stuff. Also when you spend time "reverse engineering" the basics, privileged people already can research more complex things.
You are always way behind and usually end up as a tech fixing laptops, while privileged kids go to NASA.
I ended up getting into software (I saw it as infinite parts) and the 'rich kids' ended up becoming doctors and lawyers. I'm really happy I didn't end up like them, though, of course we do need doctors (lawyers: not so much).
Electronics was - and is - an engineers game and I personally don't care about whether someone came from a wealthy background or a poor one, jealousy is only going to get you so far, grit, perseverance and smarts will count for at least as much as pedigree in a somewhat meritocratic environment.
For the start-up lottery it's a different thing, there your parents will pretty much determine the outcome because if you are already rich you can take much bigger risks. But having a scope or wanting a scope so badly that you'll build your own (I recall hand-drawing the scale for my first VOM, and converting a small BW TV to a low frequency scope) isn't going to make huge difference and building your own test gear (at least, the basic versions of them) will give you a huge degree of insight into how it all works.
Fixing laptops doesn't require electronics knowledge beyond replacing units, much like being a car mechanic.
BTW, when I eventually did get a 'proper' scope (a nice dual beam 60 MHz Tek from a surplus store) I found that the difference between 'no scope' and 'crap scope' was a lot larger than between 'crap scope' and 'good scope'. I still have the Tek :)
Maybe for previous generations. Today there are unprecedented public and private campaigns and grants to bring STEM opportunities to low-income schools.
I worked for years at ESA and at least there this was not true at all. Most of us came from pretty normal backgrounds and had a passion for engineering.
It's definitely not a place where "money ambitious" people go. It's not particularly well paid compared to other engineering jobs (and I think this is even more true at NASA). What we all had in common was fierce passion and a sense of fulfillment that I haven't found anywhere else yet.
The are some families that had been wealthy for generations, but there are also some that worked hard so that their children could do what they could not. Eventually this builds up.
You could argue that to have the vision of planning ahead for the children's life is a kind of cultural privilege, but then you could also argue that this can be learned from observation and introspection.
There are still some groups of people that have some advantages when trying to do this compared to others, this have been changing over the years.
The point is, there is privilege but it's not the single factor and maybe nor the most important one.
I don't think a Mars mission compares in any way to what most SV hackers do, whether they do it for profit (especially the ignoble kind, ad revenue) or for the common good (open source dev). Not just in scale and timeframe and budget, but in how the organization (or lack of organization in the case of many open source projects) operates.
Also, your application of the word "hacker" to their simply having to adopt to circumstance or be able to update priorities and approaches pretty much takes all the meaning out of the word, because your loose meaning pretty much applies to any endeavor, from business to war to parenting to love.
The helicopter is already outside its original mission parameters. It was only supposed to make 5 flights - probably the engineering team didn't want to invest money or weight or complexity in something they knew wouldn't be an issue during their originally scheduled timeframe.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadThat sounds like a nerve-racking bit of troubleshooting!
IIRC, this dust-on-solar-panels problem has been a serious threat to all the Mars rover missions. I wouldn't make sense on a helicopter, but it seems it would be smart to include some kind of emergency-use brush to clean it from the panels as a last-ditch solution on a rover. Especially considering how greatly-"extended" missions seem de rigueur for NASA.
All of the rovers start with a fairly small mission and it gets extended as it provides good science and congress/NASA finds money to continue to staff the support teams and get time on the Deep Space Network.
Rotorcraft are a special case though, because they come with powerful fans attached. Maybe the next rotorcraft will have a way to direct its prop wash over its solar panels.
So, layers of Mylar and a way to peel back or roll away.
I imagine there are people on this planet that could spend an entire day transfixing you with a conversation on the physical phenomena of dust collecting on solar panels on Mars. Why it happens, what's unique about the environment, what isn't. What's been tried, what will be tried next, why the current configuration was chosen vs others that might have better or worse results, what breakthroughs in materials science might make the whole thing go away, etc etc etc.
Aircraft on Mars are obviously always going to be very weight constrained. I wonder if some of the microwave power transfer tech could be used to reduce the cycle time and help in situations like this. Maybe when we can start getting multi kW generators and/or fixed solar arrays on the planet it will start to make more sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTc3PsW5ghQ
For an experimental helicopter that must fly around, Ingenuity's mass budget is extremely tight. I don't know how they'd put something on the helicopter, and I imagine it's considered far too risky to have the rover have some way of cleaning the helicopter.
Or just hope the vehicle's flight envelope is wider than the "dust's ability to stick to the panel" envelope. You're gonna lose the vehicle either way so why not try it.
I think part of the problem is that the kind of people who have a lot of experience solving these kinds of problems don't really have career paths that intersect with NASA so the engineers spec'ing out the vehicle don't really know with good enough levels of certainty when they can make cheap minor tweaks to the design of the vehicle that will produce some secondary positive result. And you can't go just call up the professional specialists and ask for their input because the processes involved are too bloated and would cost too much money to invoke over small secondary features so you really need that kind of expertise in house or not at all.
Almost thought they lost it
https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26696/debris-field-from-pers...
https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26694/rovers-backshell-seen-...
https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26695/rover-landing-gear-see...
Apollo 12 intentionally landed within walking distance of Surveyor 3 [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_12
Oh wait, Mars is almost a vacuum and the parachute is really just used to slow the lander as it's traveling at ridiculous speeds. Now I wonder what the terminal velocity was-- certainly higher than it would be on Earth, even with 1/3 the gravity?
I wonder if there are good pics of the part of the delivery system that used rockets and didn't have a parachute? Did it fare worse?
I.e., a plane that can fly up there on Earth could fly on Mars at low altitude.
Because gravity times travel distance is constant for constant aerodynamic efficiency and constant engine ISP, and Mars is both smaller than Earth and has significantly lower gravity, a hydrolox fuel-cell (driving electric props) flying wing should be able to do a "half-way around the planet" trip with reasonable cargo, followed by re-fueling oxygen, and flying back to the other place, before running out of hydrogen.
(Alternatively, at less than 50% cargo capacity loss, it could collect the water exhaust from the fuel cell, to recover the hydrogen.)
The main issue of such a plane would be that the lift-off speed on the runway would be about half the speed of sound. Maybe use the electric motors to drive fuel pumps and run hydrolox rocket engines for lift-off? Sounds like that could allow VTOL.
And a parent who worked an NASA.
I agree I don't think excessive privilege is responsible for success in technical fields. But it sure doesn't hurt to have friends or family members already on the inside.
The idea that the only way to get here is to start rich is just wrong, and offensive to those of us who didn't. You don't need rich parents, and there's no royal road to tech if you have 'em.
It's not mechanical, of course; my sister never particularly enjoyed maths and went on to become a nurse. That's fine, of course; but clearly the road would have been harder for me if I wasn't born in an environment which valued maths and science as naturally interesting.
My mother's siblings have all finished the university, and so have my cousins on my mother's side (or are still going to the university). Among my father's siblings, he's the only one who finished the university, and coincidentally of my cousins on my father's side the only who finished university are my siblings and I. Of course I don't pretend this is statistically significant, but I think the real privilege with culture is not the money or somebody who makes it easier for you to get a job, but rather being born in an environment that stimulates your desire for culture.
I really did just figure out most things on my own, through trial and error or old books. In an environment where most people either didn't care what I did or actively discouraged that kind of experimentation. Which is why I don't have a lot of patience for that argument up there: no, it's not privilege, anyone can do it, just most people don't.
Electronics was - and is - an engineers game and I personally don't care about whether someone came from a wealthy background or a poor one, jealousy is only going to get you so far, grit, perseverance and smarts will count for at least as much as pedigree in a somewhat meritocratic environment.
For the start-up lottery it's a different thing, there your parents will pretty much determine the outcome because if you are already rich you can take much bigger risks. But having a scope or wanting a scope so badly that you'll build your own (I recall hand-drawing the scale for my first VOM, and converting a small BW TV to a low frequency scope) isn't going to make huge difference and building your own test gear (at least, the basic versions of them) will give you a huge degree of insight into how it all works.
Fixing laptops doesn't require electronics knowledge beyond replacing units, much like being a car mechanic.
BTW, when I eventually did get a 'proper' scope (a nice dual beam 60 MHz Tek from a surplus store) I found that the difference between 'no scope' and 'crap scope' was a lot larger than between 'crap scope' and 'good scope'. I still have the Tek :)
It's definitely not a place where "money ambitious" people go. It's not particularly well paid compared to other engineering jobs (and I think this is even more true at NASA). What we all had in common was fierce passion and a sense of fulfillment that I haven't found anywhere else yet.
You could argue that to have the vision of planning ahead for the children's life is a kind of cultural privilege, but then you could also argue that this can be learned from observation and introspection.
There are still some groups of people that have some advantages when trying to do this compared to others, this have been changing over the years.
The point is, there is privilege but it's not the single factor and maybe nor the most important one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
Also, your application of the word "hacker" to their simply having to adopt to circumstance or be able to update priorities and approaches pretty much takes all the meaning out of the word, because your loose meaning pretty much applies to any endeavor, from business to war to parenting to love.
My inexperienced mind thinks of things like windshield wipers, maybe some electronics to oppose the static forces of dust sticking to the panels?
We sure can't send someone over there every 6 months to wash the panels off, that's for sure.
Is Ingenuity a spacecraft? I thought it was an aircraft/helicopter... is the Martian atmosphere not characterized as containing air?
Really? Could someone with more knowledge about this outline how different the Mars copter is from a run of the mill quad copter?