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So it says at The Register.
NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was designed to fly just five times, but last week the little rotorcraft that could clocked up its 50th flight in the red planet's thin atmosphere.
Flight 50 departed Airfield Lambda on April 13th and required 145.7 seconds to reach Airfield Mu, a 322-meter flight at a brisk 4.6 meters per second, cruising at a new height record of 18 meters above Martian soil.
On The Register's analysis of NASA's flight log Ingenuity's records are:
Longest duration flight – 169.5 seconds on August 16th, 2021, during flight 12
Longest distance – 704 meters on April 8th, 2022, during flight 25
Fastest flight – 6.5 meters per second on April 2nd, 2023, during flight 49
Total flight time – 5,349.9 seconds, or just over 89 minutes
Total horizontal flight distance – 11,546 meters"When we first flew, we thought we would be incredibly lucky to eke out five flights," said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at JPL, in a blog post celebrating the 50th flight . "We have exceeded our expected cumulative flight time since our technology demonstration wrapped by 1,250 percent and expected distance flown by 2,214 percent."
The Ingenuity team is now planning a 51st flight to bring the 'copter close to the "Fall River Pass" region of Jezero Crater. Future flights will head towards "Mount Julian," from where the craft will enjoy panoramic views of the nearby Belva Crater, an 800-metre dent in Mars' surface.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Wednesday April 19, @06:57PM (5 children)
This is what you get when you meticulously overengineer something for its environment. A form of intelligent design, if you will.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @01:05AM
I'll assume he's going for the deliberate undersell to justify pumping up that "2,214 percent" number. Otherwise it would be pretty shocking if they selected a $100M mission as well as giving up valuable mission resources for something that had such little confidence would work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @04:49AM (2 children)
My grandpa used to remind me that if I can't spare the time to do it right, then I likely will have to make the time to do it over.
JPL did exactly what I would have them do...they are dealing with never-been-done before kinda stuff. They took the time to understand before plug-n-pray. And it shows
That "faster, better, cheaper" crap of the 70's and 80's killed our space program along with numerous astronauts, some done in by bizarre acts of wanton carelessness and hopeful thinking not backed up by the laws of physics.
JPL is exemplary in fixing the soiled reputation left behind by their snap-snap-snap damm the torpedoes, full speed ahead predecessors.
Now, we can all enjoy the design improvements in other things as well.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday April 20, @06:30AM (1 child)
FBC (Faster, Better, Cheaper) was a 1990s thing [sciencedirect.com].
What happened in the 1970s and 80s was not FBC. It was irrational pursuit of huge, expensive, glacial programs, white elephants: Space Shuttle, ISS (started life as a US answer to MIR called "Freedom" in the years of the first term of the Reagan administration), Galileo, Voyager, and so on. These missions often took decades to construct before they ever deployed.
Further, all sorts of irrational decisions were made due to the huge investments. For example, both times Space Shuttles and their crews were lost NASA actually knew ahead of time specifically that the problems existed and could result in loss of mission and crew (engineers had warned of the frozen o-rings on the solid rocket boosters and recommended not to launch before the Challenger accident and the unusual ice strike on Columbia had been observed and specific advice to look at the site of the ice strike (which was on the blind side of the Shuttle) had been dismissed). Many missions were sized for the payload bay of the Space Shuttle. They were too big to launch on normal rockets and thus, greatly more expensive than they otherwise would be.
Your grandpa just described NASA's response to the end of the Saturn V launch vehicle. They never did find an adequate replacement in 50 years of attempts. My take is that they never should have tried. I've heard many complaints over the years that NASA never got enough money. None of those people had a clue what the right amount of money would be or where we'd get it from. What they miss is that NASA could have done amazing things over the decades, if it had tried to work with that budget rather than attempt to expand the budget via white elephant construction.
For example, if NASA had continued with the Saturn 1B (which crudely is a Falcon 9-scale vehicle) and a reusable shuttle sized to top that vehicle, they'd have plenty of funding for space missions and space policies that actually advanced US interests in the future and space. For another example, they could have encouraged commercial space flight in 1975 instead of much later in 2010 [wikipedia.org].
On the unmanned side, a simple improvement is that they could have launched multiple probes of a given design instead of one-offs. R&D doesn't get more expensive, if you make 5 copies of a spacecraft instead of 1 (most unmanned missions, the R&D was over half the cost of the mission). If the mission was worth doing once, it was usually worth doing five times. I recommend reading up on the early history of the Apollo program and the important role that series of unmanned vehicles played in finding launch sites for the manned missions. In particular, the landers could have developed further into sample return missions. We could have had hundreds or thousands of returned samples from various places on the Moon before we landed more people on the Moon!
They could have developed, even within the constraints of the US political system, long term plans that furthered a US presence in space rather than burn their budget on those above white elephants. Twenty years ago it would have been difficult to describe the huge opportunity cost of the path NASA took, but not today. SpaceX shows that we missed out on a lot.
Consider this hypothetical situation. A SpaceX started in 1975 instead of 2002. Everything happening a full 27 years sooner. Keep in mind that most of the technology SpaceX relies on was already well developed by 1975 - two stage rockets (the Saturn 1B was such), the propellant mixes that Falcon 9 has used, telemetry, gimballing rocket nozzles, etc. Now, instead of being on the verge of a Saturn V-equivalent vehicle today, it would have been in 1996. What could we have done by now 27 years later with such a cheap, high payload vehicle? How much future have we lost?
This is not a problem isolated to NASA. We are squandering opportunity in every field. Some of it is due to resistance to change. But most is actually due to the poor processes we resort to for our R&D. Here, SpaceX didn't become the number one launch provider in the world because it had a $20 billion budget for the past 50 years, but because they were highly focused top to bottom on building a launch vehicle with good economics (high launch frequency, increasing reusability, etc). That's the type of technology development that will change the world and us for the better.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday April 20, @10:48AM
It's a very interesting comment, thanks.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday April 20, @05:11AM
Except, of course, if you lose the probe anyway because you didn't meticulously overengineer for the problem that killed the mission. Luck is indeed involved with a typical NASA mission.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Thursday April 20, @10:07AM
These kind of stats should be front page news imho.
'Oh and by the way we've flown a drone remotely over 11 kilometers on another planet.'