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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the flying-drones-on-Mars dept.

NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars, but what for?:

NASA's mission to send another rover to Mars is set to culminate in a successful landing on February 18, 2021, but that's not all the agency is sending to the Red Planet.

The Perseverance rover – once it lands next month – will begin scouring a section of Mars that astronomers believe could have hosted and supported microbial life in the past.

But a second passenger aboard the lander vehicle will be meant to do something else entirely.

The Mars Helicopter – also known as Ingenuity – will deploy alongside the rover, and will be NASA's attempt at trying to achieve successful controlled flight on Mars for the very first time.

Ingenuity weighs only four pounds, and is described as a "small, but mighty passenger". Though it has a fuselage (main body) no bigger than a tissue box, it's supposedly strong enough to brave the harsh weather conditions on the planet during flight.

Started as a wishful project about six years ago, the engineers behind Ingenuity understood that while it was theoretically possible to fly in Mars' super-thin atmosphere, there was no real conviction that they'd be able to build a vehicle that could fly, communicate, and survive on its own on Mars.

But after rounds of research and testing, the team have managed to create a flying vehicle that has so far survived all tests emulating Mars' environment, and the next step is to make it fly on the Red Planet for real.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:20PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:20PM (#1106134) Journal

    Mars apparently has enough atmosphere to allow it to work, so it can be used to speed up exploration.

    Titan will be the real showcase for interplanetary aviation, as well as boats and submarines in the methane seas.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:35PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:35PM (#1106140)

    Ponies also.

  • (Score: 4, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:46PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:46PM (#1106153) Journal

    so it can be used to speed up exploration.

    You misspelled exploitation.

    Titan will be the real showcase for interplanetary aviation, as well as boats and submarines in the methane seas.

    The methane seize and atmosphere. On Titan, wouldn't the natives consider an explosive dangerous gas to be, oh my gosh, oxygen! You can even weld using compressed tanks of oxygen gas! Oxygen gas could be piped into homes to power furnaces and stoves, with a small pilot light.

    (with apologies to James P Hogan's Code of the Life Maker . . . ) On Titan, the capitol building is built out of really hard stone (h2O). But on the invaders' home planet, it is so hot that one wonders how life could even exist. It is so hot that the stone the capitol is built from would be molten liquid -- and they have entire oceans of this molten stone!

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