What Flight 50 Means for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter:
JPL's Ingenuity helicopter is preparing for the 50th flight of its 5-flight mission to Mars. Flight 49, which took place last weekend, was its fastest and highest yet—the little helicopter flew 282 meters at an altitude of 16 meters, reaching a top speed of 6.50 meters per second. Not a bad performance for a tech demo that was supposed to be terminated two years ago.
From here, things are only going to get more difficult for Ingenuity. As the Perseverance rover continues its climb up Jezero crater's ancient river delta, Ingenuity is trying its best to scout ahead. But, the winding hills and valleys make it difficult for the helicopter to communicate with the rover, and through the rover, to its team back on Earth. And there isn't a lot of time or room to spare, because Ingenuity isn't allowed to fly too close to Perseverance, meaning that if the rover ever catches up to the helicopter, the helicopter may have to be left behind for the rover's own safety. This high-stakes race between the helicopter scout and the science rover will continue for kilometers.
For the Ingenuity team, this new mode of operation was both a challenge and an opportunity. This was nothing new for folks who have managed to keep this 30-day technology demo alive and healthy and productive for years, all from a couple hundred million kilometers away. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Ingenuity Team Lead Teddy Tzanetos at JPL last week about whether flying on Mars is ever routine, how they upgraded Ingenuity for its extended mission, and what the helicopter's success means for the future of airborne exploration and science on Mars.
The core of the challenge here is that the paradigm has changed. When you look at the first year of Ingenuity's extended operations, we were still in the Three Forks area, where the ground was flat. We could get line of sight from the helicopter to the rover from hundreds and hundreds of meters away. Our longest link that we established was 1.2 kilometers—a massive distance.
And then we started to realize that the rover was going to enter the river delta in like six months. It's going to start climbing up through dozens and dozens of meters of elevation change and passing through ravines, and that's going to start presenting a telecom issue for us. We knew that it couldn't be business as usual anymore—if we still wanted to keep this helicopter mission going, not only did we need to change the way we were operating, but we also had to change the helicopter itself.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Wednesday April 12, @01:42PM (6 children)
Really? You're going to send a 'helicopter' all the way to Mars and not expect it to last?
They probably built it hoping for long life, but, like Scotty, say it'll only last 2 years so when it lasts longer, they'll say "Hey, Scotty! Great job keeping our warp engines running!"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12, @02:00PM (2 children)
Under-promise and over-deliver. It's the MO of the JPL.
While I'm consistently very impressed with JPL, that MO is becoming somewhat predictive. They under-promise in order to shape the narrative in such a way that they can then go "look we did all these other things as well, aren't we great" which reeks of conservatism and CYA-ness. It's CYA-ness in the sense that they know all the things they want to do, they just don't tell you about all of them. That way they don't have to admit defeat if they don't get to any one of the items on their "silent" list.
Like I said, JPL has consistently impressed me, I'm just starting to wonder whether that is because they always try to control the narrative with their under-promising.
In the words of Ian Flemming: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12, @06:08PM
For years there was a running joke in the industry that goes something to the effect: the following are example JPL press releases:
The joke of course being that they are NASA when it suits their needs, and not NASA when it is convenient. They are a long time NASA contractor, but most lay people think they are actually a part of NASA.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday April 12, @08:36PM
Part of that is press driven. If you shoot for the near impossible and only accomplish 90% of it, the press will paint you as a big fat failure who can't pour water out of a boot. Then Congress will sharpen the knives and slash your budget so they can look good in the press.
OTOH, promise 50% and get to 90%, the press says you delivered all you promised and more, hailing you as a rare success in a government full of fail. Someone else gets the budget cuts.
Given that accomplishing 100% of objectives first try for something nobody has ever done before and many say can't be done at all is very unlikely, which strategy would you pursue?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12, @02:01PM (2 children)
This is an important point that always goes unmentioned for NASA missions, or at least articles about NASA missions. They have designed mission lives which means "if it lasts this long and we meet our stated primary science objectives, then we can all declare it a success" and the proposed mission costs are based upon that. But they are expected to last much longer, and in fact, consumables such as coolants and fuel are often maxed out and much more than they need to do the mission design time. And all of that is perfectly fine and the way it should be done, but nobody can say with a straight face that anyone expected this project "to be terminated two years ago" if it was still functioning fine and operating in tandem with the rover.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12, @09:51PM (1 child)
Another way of saying that is, in order to guarantee to meet those objectives, they build in a huge amount of margin, redundancy and so on so that the probability of failure is tiny. These mission extensions that last for years and years extra are a direct result of that.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday April 13, @02:53PM
Exactly what I was going to say.
Just getting the probes delivered costs insane amounts of money, so they design them to be able to go through hell and still complete the primary mission. 99% of the time all the redundancy and overbuilding proves unnecessary, and can instead be "cashed in" for a much longer operating life and a vastly expanded mission scope.
Everyone is hoping for that long life when they design the probe, but that's not why they overbuild it. NASA especially has a "failure is not an option" culture, even when human lives aren't on the line. And so they design their probes so that they *will* be able to complete their primary mission unless something truly catastrophic occurs (like forgetting to convert between feet and meters when programming the lander, and vaporizing the probe on impact instead of landing it...)