On the plains of Jezero, the secrets of Mars' past await us! Follow for the latest news, updates, pretty pics, and community discussion on NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's most ambitious mission to Mars!
"The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield."
Though we can't come to you to say "goodbye", have a good rest little one, your job is over. You did so much more than we expected of you. You made us proud.
~~IIRC that "little one" is the size of a car or minivan.~~ Ingenuity isn't the big one.
The combination of technologies that made this possible is really mind bending.
Without a human ever setting foot on Mars, we can identify and solve the physics of flight in a new atmosphere on the first try.
The idea of a drone that can swim below the ice in the oceans of Europa doesn't seem that far fetched any more.
Except that radio communications below water don't propagate very well.
Well, just used a wired connection then
"Leave a little slack in the line to account for the different orbital periods. Yeah, about 300,000,000 miles ahould do it..."
I had a really long Lan cable that let us play in different rooms. It's buried in a closet, but if nasa really needs it I could dig that out
I imagine if NASA has called it, it's definitely beyond functional. They've done so many other resurrections of what seemed like a lost mission before. Miracle workers. Just that it worked so well to fly for so many times says everything.
Actually i wonder if they're erring on the side of caution, because if the helicopter messes up during flight it could hit the rover if its nearby. (Is there a rover or other device nearby?)
Not close enough - After the drive on Sol 1042 they are 806.16 meters (2644.87 ft) apart. The record flight distance was just 708.91 meters (2325.83 ft). However they wont be flying it again. They lost ~25 % of that one rotor (JPL engineering in the teleconference) and even if the rotor was still in balance (highly unlikely) the loss of 25% of a rotor, means it could not gain lift in the thin atmosphere at full speed. They plan on talking to the rover while they drive out of the crater in the months ahead as there is a ton of engineering data to garner: Solar cell generation, battery performance data, radio signal propagation as well as imaging the terrain for change (science), plus I'm sure they'll be thinking of a few other things it could do...
Did you read the post? It states the rover is too far to even attempt taking an image of the helicopter, so makes sense that they aren't erring on the side of caution because of proximity.
Edit: sorry, I mistook top comment for post body.
I think it's close to a kilometer away.
what is it that pale blue dot?
Looks like a piece of the carbon fibre rotor to me
i, well , i was trying to exert some emotional experience.
these are machines, nonetheless they are an expression of human existence; they are human, in such a remarkable scenario. they cannot come back; home is lost forever to them, for the very same transience experienced by humans. this page explains it all, btw.
Earth
❤️
noooooooooo
I wonder if they wouldn't rotate the blades 180 degrees to compare how much is actually missing. Seems like they would be able to adjust the pitch of the blade to compensate for damage, but it could be that a large enough portion is damaged as to make it infeasible
They did plan some blade rotations, then this image came down. I hope they do more imaging. there should be a lot more images on the helicopter, lets see what is made public in the days ahead
"'Tis but a flesh wound."
