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Flying has never been a safe or precise art. Even when it is not on Mars! Latest from the Ingenuity saga, from NASA it's own self.
On the 91st Martian day, or sol, of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter performed its sixth flight. The flight was designed to expand the flight envelope and demonstrate aerial-imaging capabilities by taking stereo images of a region of interest to the west. Ingenuity was commanded to climb to an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters) before translating 492 feet (150 meters) to the southwest at a ground speed of 9 mph (4 meters per second). At that point, it was to translate 49 feet (15 meters) to the south while taking images toward the west, then fly another 164 feet (50 meters) northeast and land.
Telemetry from Flight Six shows that the first 150-meter leg of the flight went off without a hitch. But toward the end of that leg, something happened: Ingenuity began adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern. This behavior persisted throughout the rest of the flight. Prior to landing safely, onboard sensors indicated the rotorcraft encountered roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees, large control inputs, and spikes in power consumption.
[...] Approximately 54 seconds into the flight, a glitch occurred in the pipeline of images being delivered by the navigation camera. This glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps. From this point on, each time the navigation algorithm performed a correction based on a navigation image, it was operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken. The resulting inconsistencies significantly degraded the information used to fly the helicopter, leading to estimates being constantly "corrected" to account for phantom errors. Large oscillations ensued.
Large oscillations are better than small ones, if the truth be told. Godspeed, Ingenuity!
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by TrentDavey on Friday May 28 2021, @06:44PM (9 children)
Jesus, why don't you Americans drag yourselves in to the 21st century and adopt the metric system?
Oh right. "You can have my feet and miles when you pry them from my cold, dead hands".
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 28 2021, @06:56PM (3 children)
Actually, the metric system was 19th century, like Marxism.
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @07:12PM (2 children)
And slavery, so it wasn't all bad.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 28 2021, @07:21PM (1 child)
You're about as sharp as a bowling ball, boy. Slavery has existed for thousands of years, probably tens of thousands, if not longer.
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @10:25PM
almost a wansui you might say.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday May 28 2021, @07:52PM (4 children)
Just think for a second. Consider the ugly long decimal numbers such a thing would introduce into the following words of wizdumb . . .
Police can legally stop you for having too much tent on your window.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Osamabobama on Friday May 28 2021, @08:51PM (2 children)
Let's see how bad the decimals look:
You just need to understand that the effective range of 'someone who is mad' is generally much less than either a kilometer or a mile. The real key to the advice is the monosyllabic nature of the word 'mile.' You could use 'click,' but that's relatively obscure jargon, so it loses something.
In any case, folksy advice sounds better if it is old fashioned, so sticking with the mile is warranted.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:45AM
FTFY.
Plus it would look even weirder as 0.6213712 mile.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:27PM
If they're only a kilometer away, they are more likely to catch you!
Police can legally stop you for having too much tent on your window.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 28 2021, @08:52PM
The really bad part of that is, the metric shoes. Who wants to walk a mile in size 42 shoes? Everyone will look like Bozo the Clown.
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face