NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

[csdreamer7]

On Jupiter Broadcasting there was a lot of interviews on how this was a Linux powered device and could be the first of many new Linux devices on Mars by JPL. If I remembered correctly they used a space hardened Power cpu with an ancient version of Yocto since the newer versions of it did not have working drivers. When the rover had an issue they actually used the helicoptor's userspace command line GNU utilities to debug and get logs from the rover to send to Earth.

Also, this makes Mars the second planet that uses Linux more than Windows as noted by the tweet in the linux below. :-)

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/19/22291324/linux-perseveran...

[heavyset_go]

The space-hardened POWER CPU was in Perseverance.

Some info from Wikipedia:

> The rover's computer uses the BAE Systems RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer based on a ruggedized PowerPC G3 microprocessor (PowerPC 750). The computer contains 128 megabytes of volatile DRAM, and runs at 133 MHz. The flight software runs on the VxWorks operating system, is written in C and is able to access 4 gigabytes of NAND non-volatile memory on a separate card.

[kurts_mustache]

> When the rover had an issue they actually used the helicoptor's userspace command line GNU utilities to debug and get logs from the rover to send to Earth.

Wow, such a great testament to The Unix Philosophy of building small, modular, focused tools that can be combined together to do all sorts of interesting and more complex tasks. I'm sure no one imagined using these utilities from a helicopter to retrieve rover logs to aid in diagnostics, but here we are. What a cool story.

[inamberclad]

Fun fact - the cameras that captures Perseverance's landing are also Linux based and vim is installed - at least on the later model that I worked with.

[dylan604]

> If I remembered correctly they used a space hardened Power cpu

If you're remembering correctly, then I'm misremembering in that this has essentially a Snapdragon chip and not a rad hardened CPU at all

[patall]

For me, being listed as a contributor to Ingenuity is one of the highlights of my career in software development. I mean, I just fixed a bug in some python library, but that was enough to get the GitHub Ingenuity badge. And when ever I am asked for a fun fact about myself, I can answer: some of my code is flying on Mars :)

[bitwize]

Speaking as someone some of whose code probably helped search for the fallen Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 a decade back, I gotta say, you have me beat by a country mile and deserve to be chuffed.

[spoonjim]

I don’t think you should be apologetic about the small scale of your contribution: the animating principle of open source is that the aggregation of small contributions like yours can create outcomes that rival those of even the wealthiest organizations in the world.

[mlsu]

Ingenuity is running Python?

[latchkey]

I contributed to `twbs/bootstrap` and got the badge too, lol.

[Kye]

Didn't this use mostly off the shelf parts? If so, I wonder how this will impact costs on future missions. If they can do more with consumer hardware, they can save budget to apply toward more science.

[heavyset_go]

It was a PoC, I assume mission critical hardware will go through the same vetting, hardening, etc processes that they currently do.

It does bode well for sending cheaper "nice to have" experiments on missions, though.

[systems_glitch]

Applied Ion Systems is throwing these kind of rocks with small-scale electric space propulsion. It's interesting to see both the excitement and energy from eager researchers and hardcore hobbyists (cubesat folks), and the oftentimes rude and nasty pushback from industry.

[bloggie]

There is a lot of cost savings in taking COTS parts and qualifying them for space vs. designing new space-qualified parts, we will see more of this in the future especially with expensive niche technologies with a lot of crossover such as optical communications.

[artemonster]

Yes, it did. I like the sentiment but I wonder how much conflict of interest would undermine this idea. Imagine how many companies are involved in developing space grade one-off hardware! Also, why would a highly bureaucratic structure undercut the amount of money that they themselves are asking for (and receiving) out of a budget? Savings are not aligned with the interest of such structure. Its not that for the amount you have saved you can allocate rest of the funds for something else (usually this is how it works with publicly funded projects AFAIK)

[ijustlovemath]

"off the shelf" in aerospace means that you can buy it from an aerospace manufacturer, and don't have to build it in house. There's considerably more engineering behind these products than the equivalent consumer electronics

[iknowstuff]

The original Elon Musk biography describes how a legacy aerospace engineer joined spacex and was tasked with a part:

> He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’”

[xeromal]

I actually go to the gym with one of the guys who worked(s) on this copter/drone. Super cool guy

[daed]

How much can he bench?

[pimlottc]

It was probably just stuck in a tree.

[cubefox]

Or a Martian canal.

[standardUser]

I'm curious how long they expected it to remain in working condition. NASA has a habit of underestimating lifespans by a comical amount. It will be like "we expected the rover to operate for 10 weeks and that was 6 years ago". I think the most extreme example is Voyager 1, which was on a 5-year mission that reached nearly 50 years.

[jacoblambda]

They planned for three 90 second flights prior to launch. After those worked they transitioned over to longer "operations demo" flights and those were extended tentatively out to 12 flights. After the 21st flight they just stopped manually allocating labor and funding to the project for a set number of flights and instead gave them a running budget for indefinite continued operations.

So while "strictly speaking" they planned for three 90 second flights. There was the unstated assumption that it'd be used for much more than that as long as it actually worked effectively.

[cwillu]

“We need the rover to operate for 10 weeks and will be discredited as an organization if it fails at 9” is what causes that. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

[russtrotter]

I always feel like NASA has mastered the basic "under promise, over deliver" philosophy that keeps the lights on and the next missions funded. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at who they get to tap dance in front of the congressional committee or how they schmooze the decadal people to rise above the rest.

[simion314]

We will use more helicopters instead of rovers for new missions ? Or larger crafts would be much harder or riskier to use ?

Or maybe have a helicopter that can move the rover with the equipment to different locations.

[jvanderbot]

Surfacing a comment: Here's a paper that describes what the next gen could/should be. The lead author is the head of Mars heli, IIRC.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9843501

In short, future designs target ~30kg heli, 5kg payloads. Other designs by collaborators are closer to 20kg. It's probably possible to transport a few of these on the existing lander technology, which would be awesome.

The scholar.google.com keywords you want are "Mars Science Helicopter" and a good touchpoint author is T. Tzanetos or S. Withrow-Maser

[wongarsu]

Ingenuity was just a technology demonstrator. I think it demonstrated the technology splendidly, so we are likely to see more helicopters on Mars in the future.

Not sure if Nasa has said yet which roles they see for future Mars helicopters. The initial idea behind Ingenuity was to use them as scouting vehicles for rovers. Of course rovers improved a lot too, with better autonomous driving. But with a Mars rover driving about 100 meters/yards per day scouting helicopters are still useful.

Maybe we will also see Helicopters carrying more instruments themselves. But I imagine in the beginning that's mostly better imaging instruments. Weight is still an issue for flying things, no matter the planet. But maybe we will see some future missions that instead of a car-sized rover and one tiny helicopter have a fleet of helicopters with a small support-rover for exploring wider areas.

[wyldfire]

The existing helicopter is extremely small and light, IIRC. less than one kg. So it definitely won't be picking up a 900kg rover, even if you tried to scale it up somehow. The atmosphere is just too thin to support anything but a minimal payload.

But yeah having more helicopters might be feasible - for surveying the surface.

[jessriedel]

I think the current plan is that helicopters will be very light with minimal instrumentation and will be used mostly to scout ahead for rovers. The rovers will be much heavier and include many instruments.

(Of course, all of NASA's long-term plans for Mars would be completely disrupted if Starship lowers the cost-per-kg of delivering equipment by two orders of magnitude, which arguably is likely.)

[jvanderbot]

A heli that can move a rover is basically worse than a heli that has rover instruments and a few wheels. You have extra weight and parts and complexity for hitching and carrying that you can just avoid by giving a small rover flying ability.

Even the combo is probably too much complexity. A heli with good imagers, spectrometers, and the ability to cart soil samples would be fantastic.

[surfpel]

That's the goal, yes. Depending on the destination, naturally. Here's what's planned for Titan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(spacecraft)

[somenameforme]

Minimizing moving parts, so much as possible, when dealing with hardware tens of millions of miles away, let alone with a 13 minute delay in 1-way messaging, is generally smart. And Mars' atmosphere is so thin that these rovers will never be moving any meaningful payload, so their only real use case is as a scouting type system. But they also add very little value there given the existence of orbiting satellites. Even the Mars Recon Orbiter (from 2005) captures images in the < 1m resolution range.

IMO NASA wanted to try to deal with the sort of 'oh boy... another rover' fatigue and saw the drone as a way to spice things up with some passable science arguments behind it, and a relatively minimal cost. Further supporting this is that the helicopter wasn't an initial part of the plan - it was strapped on at the 'last minute', speaking in government time. In any case, I would comfortably wager against us seeing more drones in future missions, at least to Mars.

[analog31]

In the shorter term, I see the helicopter as making the rover more capable, by finding routes and destinations of interest. And the rover makes the helicopter more capable by providing a recharging station. So they're both at their best when working as a system. Maybe a rover can support multiple choppers.

[deadbabe]

Why not some helium balloon type craft that could float along with low power for longer periods of times? Could cover vast distances? Descend into fertile plains looking for samples?

[dotnet00]

IIRC as a result of Ingenuity's success, one of the proposals for the Mars sample return mission architecture involved several helicopters to retrieve Perseverance's sample canisters (it drops them as it goes along, so that there's no worry about how to get the samples out of the rover in the future).

I should add though that the prospects of the parasites in Congress properly funding such a complex mission seem pretty low for now.

[Trekker666]

> "Good news today," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) wrote on X, formerly Twitter, late Saturday.

I heard this line in my mind with Professor Fansworth's voice.

[HPsquared]

So did it crash, or freeze?

[wait_a_minute]

Yeah! Let's go NASA, Godspeed! USA, USA, USA!!! Not only has it already exceeded its objectives, but now it may generate even more useful data for new objectives...does anyone know if NASA maintains any kind of engineering blog or stream where we can learn more details about what went wrong and how they reconnected?