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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 Socrastotle on Friday January 29 2021, @06:31PM (2 children)

    by Socrastotle (13446) on Friday January 29 2021, @06:31PM (#1106656) Journal

    Everything revolutionary seems like a pipe dream, because it revolutionary change sounds irrational. I'll make an assumption that you, like I, lived through the birth of the internet. Can you imagine if somebody described what we've seen happen 30 years ago? Do you remember the first time you saw a company use an email address on TV (alongside their phone number)? It was kind of a neat feeling, but it also just felt kind of gimmicky. Even at that point, to suggest that the entire world would imminently end up online, with the world dominated by the corporations built around dominating the internet (and the people on it); all of this would just sound like some sort of weird cyberpunk 'pipe dream' that nobody would ever want to have. Turns out it's a lot more boring than it'd sound, but whatever. It did happen.

    Or just go about 30 years back before that. And can you imagine the notion of somebody suggesting that these room sized "automatic calculating machines" would eventually be scaled down to the size of a pack of candy, made millions of times more powerful, and become so cheap that they'd be in just about everything, everywhere? Again this sort of stuff just doesn't sound very reasonable.

    And interplanetary colonization will be, by far, the biggest revolution our species has ever experience. And really it may ultimately be the biggest revolution our species will ever experience - period. Because it basically means we've opened the door to the universe, the door to infinity. Right now there's no technical limitation preventing us from colonizing Mars besides price efficient rocket technology to get the quantities of stuff (and people) needed to make it there. And that technology is imminently on its way. From there it's just a Venn Diagram. There are the people that would be interested/willing to go to Mars, and those that would be able to afford to go to Mars. Both circles there will increase in size over time since it becoming 'real' will spur on more interested colonists, and technology improving + economy of scale = it becomes cheaper to go. So long as the intersection of these is some magic number, Mars colonization happens.

    I suppose my thing here is I don't see an informed argument for Mars colonization not happening.

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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 29 2021, @08:36PM (1 child)

    by Freeman (732) on Friday January 29 2021, @08:36PM (#1106692) Journal

    The major hurdle to a serious Mars colony is self-sustainability or possibly cheap-enough non-sustainability. An island like Hawaii, can't possibly feed as many people that are living on it, without imports. Thus, a Mars colony could be sustainable in a similar fashion, if the imports aren't too expensive. Here's a big difference between Hawaii and Mars, though. Hawaii is essentially what we term a Tropical Paradise. Mars is an uninhabitable desert planet. Mars has no breathable atmosphere, very little in the way of usable materials (as far as we know), possible ice/water in some form somewhere, is much more exposed to radiation from space, and is a giant desert. Nearly any place on Earth would be cheaper to live, than on Mars. One big thing that Mars does have going for it is the lack of local government and native populations. Thus, the first people that can get there and do something with it, could possibly make out like bandits. Assuming that Mars colonization ever happens. Elon Musk is making more progress than anyone else has for the last 50 years or more, but SpaceX is one company and he is one man.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Saturday January 30 2021, @05:26PM

      by Socrastotle (13446) on Saturday January 30 2021, @05:26PM (#1106912) Journal

      *Why* can't Hawaii feed itself? The answer in the most general terms is because their land available for agriculture is less than what is necessary to feed their population. Mars will, likely even for decades after its establishment, have a relatively small population with a land surface area nearly identical to the entire land surface area of the Earth. So you go from intractable problem: "not enough land", to a technical one: "can you grow food in contained environments, and can you set these environments up in a hostile planet". And the answer to both questions is yes.

      One issue the protagonist in "The Martian" had to overcome was, like you mentioned, finding water. And so he pulled some MacGyver magic, but only because the author of the book was not privy to a recent major discovery [space.com]. The Martian "desert" yields around around a liter of water per cubic foot of soil. And there is also extensive direct evidence [wikipedia.org] of a diverse range of abundant mineral resources on Mars.

      I think the biggest practical thing is something you hit on. Life on Mars will not be easy, at all. So you basically have colonists who will need to have found success on Earth (or find sponsorship from a company/government, which is going to trigger America because there will 100% be indentured labor), willing to give it all up to go live a less than pleasant life - all for the sake of achieving something that they will not live anywhere near long enough to see through to completion. But I think in a world of 8 billion, there's more than enough nutters along the lines of myself more than happy to take that "deal". And one thing's for certain - you'll definitely meet some interesting folks there!