this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover

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In a research article [...] a team led by Brian Jackson (Boise State University) described how they used information from Ingenuity to measure the speed and direction of Mars’s winds.

Previously, Jackson had carried out field experiments on Earth with a small drone to show that wind parameters could be extracted from an aircraft’s attitude data. Building on that proof-of-concept study, Jackson’s team used models to understand how Ingenuity’s attitude would change in response to winds of varying speed and direction.

The team calculated wind speeds ranging from 4.1 to 24.3 meters per second [...] Compared to meteorological models, the measured speeds tended to be higher than expected and the wind directions did not always match. These differences might reflect the influence of localized geological features, like craters and scarps that whip the wind in highly variable directions, that the models do not fully capture.

Jackson’s team found it unlikely that the higher speeds measured at Ingenuity’s higher altitude were the result of random fluctuations; instead, they proposed a physical explanation rooted in the aerodynamic conditions upwind of the rover and helicopter.

Accurate measurements of wind speeds on Mars can help scientists investigate our neighboring planet’s surface processes and dust transport, as well as help to plan safe entry, descent, and landing for future missions.

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[–] SpecialSetOfSieves 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I haven't read the entire paper yet, but these bits in the intro caught my eye:

the Ingenuity helicopter carries no scientific instrumentation, has a mass of less than 2 kg, and can only fly a few hundred meters at a stretch. Better-equipped aircraft may be possible on Mars, but even with a specialized entry-descent-and-landing approach to maximize the feasible payload, Mars rotorcraft will likely be limited to only a few kilograms, in part due to limitations of motor cooling in the thin Mars atmosphere.

These limitations for Mars aerial exploration mean that any way to reduce payload without reducing scientific output would be advantageous, and one obvious avenue is using the drone itself as an environmental probe. Motivated by these considerations, B. Jackson recently explored using a drone to measure the near-surface wind profile, i.e., wind speed as a function of altitude. As a proof of concept, this effort followed on considerable previous work that showed that the tilt of a stably hovering drone can scale with wind speed—since a rotorcraft generates forward thrust, in part, by tilting into the thrust direction, the rotorcraft would have to tilt more into a stronger headwind. Drone attitude, including yaw, pitch, and roll, must be recorded for successful navigation on Mars anyway, so these data could be a way of retrieving the near-surface wind vector without requiring additional instrumentation.

EDITED TO ADD: the paper surprisingly doesn't mention dust devils, which would be a very exciting and important avenue of research for a drone. Long live Ingenuity!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Long live Ingenuity!

Um, guys, should we tell him?

[–] SpecialSetOfSieves 0 points 6 days ago

I don't take sass from people who have the names of prominent Nazis in their username. Care to explain why you took such a step?