Ingenuity has flown on Mars!

[dnl42]

Woohoo! A helicopter has now flown on another planet.

 

Quote

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Succeeds in Historic First Flight

 

Monday, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. The Ingenuity team at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed the flight succeeded after receiving data from the helicopter via NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover at 6:46 a.m. EDT (3:46 a.m. PDT).

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-succeeds-in-historic-first-flight

 

[stevehnz]

Saw this on the TV news, thought it was quite exciting.

Steve.

[Noel Smith]

I wonder if in the future the first manned spaceflight to Mars will have men actually landing on the planet or do orbital study of the planet before returning.

 

The mathematics involved for interplanetary space flight are mind boggling.  Our planet Earth is, what, 93 million miles from the Sun. Multiply by 2 to give the diameter of Earth's orbit.

So just work out Pi times that distance (the Diameter) to give the circumference of a circle (Earth's) orbit.

Divide that by 365 (days of the year), divide again by 24 (hours per day) and divide again by 60 (minutes per hour)  to work out how many miles per minute our planet is travelling through space.

Taking into account the distance to Mars and the speed it travels around its own orbit, then things get a bit complicated.

 

How America landed men on the moon and returned them using 1960's technology compared with what we take for granted today was incredible in its day.

A modern tablet computer has more computing power than all that NASA had back in the day.

 

The concept of stars we see being light years away takes your breath away when you consider that what you are looking at happened many years in the past and billions of miles away.

[Eric Mc]

People blather on about computer power as if it is the be all and end all of spaceflight. It's not. The maths and calculations can be fairly straightforward - especially if you are going on a simple flight to a single destination and you aren't invoking gravitational assist from other bodies.

Even with that, Pioneers 10 and 11 were able to use gravitational assistance using what was, in effect, mid 1960s computing power.

The actual maths for gravitational assist missions were worked out in the early 1960s.

Obviously, computing power helps a lot but it's not essential.

 

Isaac Newton did all the basic work on gravity four centuries ago.

 

The most important factor in deciding a mission to another planet is knowing where the earth is going to be at launch, knowing where the destination planet is at launch and knowing where the destination planet will be when the spacecraft arrives there.  Other factors to consider are, how long you want the coast phase to be and whether you might want to make use of gravitational assist from another planet to -

 

a) speed up the journey

b) allow a smaller rocket to use for the initial launch

c) allow a heavier payload to be carried

 

Human missions are a bit more complicated because it is assumed that the humans might want to come home - so all these factors have to be taken into account for the return journey.

In the early 1960s, Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story called "Into the Comet". The gist of the tale is that a manned mission to a comet gets into trouble when it's onboard computer crashes and they have to resort to old fashioned manual calculating methods to bring the craft and crew home.

 

 

[GordonD]

NASA has released footage of Ingenuity in flight - WITH SOUND!

[junglierating]

On 4/24/2021 at 8:26 AM, Eric Mc said:

People blather on about computer power as if it is the be all and end all of spaceflight. It's not. The maths and calculations can be fairly straightforward - especially if you are going on a simple flight to a single destination and you aren't invoking gravitational assist from other bodies.

Even with that, Pioneers 10 and 11 were able to use gravitational assistance using what was, in effect, mid 1960s computing power.

The actual maths for gravitational assist missions were worked out in the early 1960s.

Obviously, computing power helps a lot but it's not essential.

 

Isaac Newton did all the basic work on gravity four centuries ago.

 

The most important factor in deciding a mission to another planet is knowing where the earth is going to be at launch, knowing where the destination planet is at launch and knowing where the destination planet will be when the spacecraft arrives there.  Other factors to consider are, how long you want the coast phase to be and whether you might want to make use of gravitational assist from another planet to -

 

a) speed up the journey

b) allow a smaller rocket to use for the initial launch

c) allow a heavier payload to be carried

 

Human missions are a bit more complicated because it is assumed that the humans might want to come home - so all these factors have to be taken into account for the return journey.

In the early 1960s, Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story called "Into the Comet". The gist of the tale is that a manned mission to a comet gets into trouble when it's onboard computer crashes and they have to resort to old fashioned manual calculating methods to bring the craft and crew home.

 

 

Mr Clarke was ahead of his time ....again bet he got the crew to switch it off and on again 

[Eric Mc]

No - they use (spoiler alert) abacuses (or abaci?)

[GordonD]

On 5/10/2021 at 10:07 PM, Eric Mc said:

No - they use (spoiler alert) abacuses (or abaci?)

A story which has dated badly because now they'd all have pocket calculators!

[Eric Mc]

Maybe all the batteries were flat.