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A helicopter on Mars!


Carl Sagan

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The team are just finding their feet and getting the lie of the land. The Jezero Crater where they sent the rover contains a dried up river delta so it's thought to be a good place to look for signs of past life. This picture to assess the front right wheel and see what sort of position the rover is in, also captured the surrounding hole-filled rocks. But are they igneous, with the holes caused by outgassing from volcanic material, or sedimentary where water has dissolved portions of the interior? Or something else? There are lots of cameras on the rover, I thing 20 megapixel colour ones, so you won't be disappointed once they start taking and uploading shots.

Sadly, interplanetary internet is very slow. A new probe going to one of the asteroids is going to test laser communication instead, which would dramatically increase bandwidth for transmissions across the inner solar system.

25611_PIA24429-1200.jpg

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10 minutes ago, Carl Sagan said:

The team are just finding their feet and getting the lie of the land. The Jezero Crater where they sent the rover contains a dried up river delta so it's thought to be a good place to look for signs of past life. This picture to assess the front right wheel and see what sort of position the rover is in, also captured the surrounding hole-filled rocks. But are they igneous, with the holes caused by outgassing from volcanic material, or sedimentary where water has dissolved portions of the interior? Or something else? There are lots of cameras on the rover, I thing 20 megapixel colour ones, so you won't be disappointed once they start taking and uploading shots.

Sadly, interplanetary internet is very slow. A new probe going to one of the asteroids is going to test laser communication instead, which would dramatically increase bandwidth for transmissions across the inner solar system.

25611_PIA24429-1200.jpg

Almost sounds like your describing our season and the current Pride Park pitch.

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  • 3 weeks later...

They've picked a flight zone for the first try with the helicopter. What I hadn't realized is that they haven't put a video camera on it! The claimed reason is that this is a technology demonstration mission, just trying to show we can get something too fly in Mars' incredibly thin atmosphere. But COTS cameras are so lightweight nowadays I'm disappointed one hasn't been incorporated into the flight, having spent so much money and travelled so far. Very much a missed opportunity.

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  • 4 weeks later...

The Mars helicopter Ingenuity has been sent the instruction to perform its first test flight. The way the data streams work, we won't get to know how things worked till 11.15am Monday morning, UK time 

This first test flight is a little hop only, to 3m or 10 feet in old money. 

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  • 4 weeks later...

For those of you with a pair of those old-fashioned red/green 3D glasses, you can now watch Ingenuity fly on Mars in 3D!

Also, in the early hours of this morning, the Chinese safely landed their first rover, Zhurong, on Mars. This report from the BBC is terrible because it doesn't explicitly state that you're not watching footage, just a computer animation. As opposed to the NASA actual  footage. 

 

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