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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: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday January 28 2021, @08:50PM (1 child)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Thursday January 28 2021, @08:50PM (#1106281)

    According to the idiot A/C in another thread, science is religion now.

    Presumably this drone will be used to bring the Good Word ™ to the Martians.

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  • (Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Friday January 29 2021, @08:08AM

    by Socrastotle (13446) on Friday January 29 2021, @08:08AM (#1106518) Journal

    Objecting to the 'religionification' of science, is not objecting to science. It's the exact opposite because the 'religionification' of science is the exact opposite of science. Science, at its best, is driven by extreme criticism, critique, and debate. And without bounds. The 'religionification' of science that people refer to is when people begin to take certain issues and treat them as above criticism, or to work to aggressively destroy any critique (or even more dangerously - critiquers themselves), regardless of its merit.

    It's akin to what happened with the heliocentric/geocentric universe. The consensus of the time was that Earth was the center of the universe. And interestingly enough factually disproving this without telescopes, and ideally space based telescopes, is nearly impossible. The geocentric view can be supported by a model that requires accepting really weird things (like planets such as Mercury being able to suddenly turn around and start 'revolving around the Earth' in the opposition direction), but is otherwise mostly consistent. You can even predict what and when you'll see various bodies in the sky; it is, at least broadly speaking, predictive.

    And so for 1500 years the geocentric model was held up and not just by religion as we like to imagine, but by the best and brightest astronomers of each age. And a big part of the reason is that challenging the notion of geocentricism essentially became taboo. When you're a young and upcoming scientist deciding what you want to study, you probably are not going to pick a topic whose very investigation is like to see you blacklisted and face severe consequences. Yet without these people being able to comfortably challenge the consensus, it enables bad ideas to persist far longer than they should supported by a farcical unanimity.