NASA lost contact with its Mars helicopter
NASA lost contact with its Mars helicopter
The Ingenuity helicopter, which has been fluttering around the red planet for almost three years now, fell out of contact with Perseverance, the rover that brought it to the planet (and that it communicates with using Zigbee!). NASA wrote yesterday that the flight, its 72nd, was a test of its system...
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Considering it was just meant to be a proof of concept and only fly once or twice I would say that 71 flights, a max altitude of 78 ft(24 m), and 10.6 miles or 17 kilometers of travel, not to mention all of the footage from its on board cameras, makes Ingenuity an astounding success.
Especially considering the use of off-the-shelf Snapdragon 801.
There's some nice discussion about Ingenuity here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26177619
...This processor will have not flips on Mars, possibly up to every few minutes. Their solution is to hold two copies of memory and double check operations as much as possible, and if any difference is detected they simply reboot. Ingenuity will start to fall out of the sky, but it can go through a full reboot and come back online in a few hundred milliseconds to continue flying.
-jhurlimanReboot mid flight is a funny solution
Imagine telling an airline pilot to just reboot the whole plane if something goes wrong.
During a flight is a bit much, but some aircraft have a reboot between flights as a standard procedure to fix glitches that would happen if the plane was left on for the entire time.
Planes running windows?
Nothing that high level. Different systems are running independently, some may be redundant to each other in case one fails. But run something long enough especially in extreme conditions and things can drift from the baselines. If a power off and on regularly prevents that it's a lot easier than trying to chase down gremlins that could be different each time they pop up for different reasons.
Even NASA I believe has done such resets from Apollo through the unmanned probes from time to time. Mentioning Windows, the newest versions don't really do this baseline reset if you just shut them down, even if you disable the hibernate/sleep modes, while a restart does.
"Tower, we have some problems"
"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"You'd be surprised. We only do that on the ground, though.
NASA's rovers have been kicking ass for the last few decades. Truly a testament to how great their engineering teams are
Definitely exceeded my expectations.
I think it exceeded everyone's expectations. I know I'm pretty astounded. I didn't realize it had been three years!
Based on how the rovers have over-performed on not that surprised (once we knew it could fly), but still very excited and impressed.
I was amazed it could fly at all in the thin atmosphere of Mars.
I believe they took this into account when they designed the thing.
Absolutely, but until you fly a heli on Mars you don't know 100% if it will work.
There was a veritasium video discussing how they prepared for that.