The battery power requirements for a high-def colour fuckin camera, as well as it’s data bandwidth, might be too much for the wee helicopter to handle.
It will only manage 1 minute and 20 seconds of flight time per day, using a small solar panel to recharge. Part of its power will go to the electric motors, while the rest is used for navigation and comms back to the rover. It’ll be processing a lot of data just to keep itself stable and land autonomously. Overnight it needs power reserves to stop its electronics from freezing.
The engineers say that the ideal time of day for flights will be at about 11:30 in good weather, to take advantage of a warm atmosphere and high sunlight. Later in the program if all is going well they might adjust to later afternoon flights.
It’s a 2020 version of “this machine has less processing power than a wrist watch” if you take into account the current smart wrist watches we have today.
Wow a helicopter on Mars will be impressive.
Because the atmosphere is much thinner - like 1% of Earths. So thats got to be real hard work keeping up.
Quick google - the pressure is an equivalent altitude on Earth of 30-50km.
Gravity is a bit less - but not 1%!!!!
X-Plane was fun, it had Mars. The wingspans of the planes and their takeoff distance were huge because of the atmospheric density. A helicopter would be outrageous. Fun.
@rwa
I meant a hdcfc on the rover, I understand the chopper is actually a high-tech dragonfly.
acket.
Did you guys hear? The Navy prefers that we call them 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' and not UFOs.
Oh and BTW, its spokesperson has said that they have a new policy in which “The information obtained from each individual [internal report of anomalous aerial vehicles] of any suspected training range incursion will be investigated in its own right. The information obtained in these reports will be catalogued and analyzed for the purpose of identifying any hazard to our aviators”.
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I do like this one...
https://www.xkcd.com/1235/
Boeing's crew capsule is slowly catching up to SpaceX's. Just had a successfully launch pad abort test. It wasn't a 100% success because only 2 of the 3 parachutes worked. However, the vehicle was designed to be able to handle one chute failure...
Next month will be the 1st unmaned flight hope that one will be successful too.
Then perhaps NASA will be able to fly astronauts to the space station starting next year without Russians meddling with our space program!
Did Voyager 2 make a transmission from the interstellar medium or from the heliopause?
Last edited by FaultyMario; November 5th, 2019 at 10:46 AM.
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I think 'heliopause' is basically the "line" or boundary that Voyagers crossed over in order to get to the interstellar medium, right? So it must've transmitted from the interstellar medium... or maybe it was transmitting as it crosses that boundary? Don't recalled the details. Anyway, point was that they are really really out of our solar system now...