It is early morning for me (0604 local). Will post video from Percy if somebody doesn’t beat me to it.
Brian
The entire broadcast is here. The data from the test flight begins to come in at around the 37:00 mark.
Video from Percy at about 40:50, but I expect they will extract that bit.
Brian
The members of the helicopter team were so happy! Just watching them was enough to bring a smile to your face.
The cameras used on Perseverance are truly state of the art. This article describes some of the operating specs
Thanks - that article is long!
There’s a press briefing in an hour (11am PT, 2pm ET, 6pm GMT) where hopefully they will release some video.
Press conference is in Q&A
Video:
Brian
Better put out a NOTAM. Don’t want any unfortunate accidents.
So the official routing for Perseverance (+Ingenuity) was: KXMR JZRO.
KXMR = Origin: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (Launch Complex 41), USA, Earth
JZRO = Destination: Jezero Crater, Mars
(No intermediate waypoints.)
Now we need an IATA code for Jezero Crater so we can have luggage tags for our checked baggage.
I saw that today’s first flight lasted around 40 seconds. Which is an almost perfect Wright brothers moment in extra-planetary aviation, since the first powered flight on earth lasted some 12 seconds. A pioneering moment indeed. It’s funny that we think so little nowadays about the ease of communicating back and forth with our robots on Mars, yet it takes radio signals traveling at the speed of light 17 times longer (at the current distance of Mars) to reach Earth than the total duration of Ingenuity’s first flight.
Your baggage is lost and is currently orbiting Jupiter…
And I do get a kick out of them mentioning “Chief Pilot”. Mars is what, about 3-4 light minutes away, so any signals sent will not be acted upon until 3 minutes after the pilot sends them and if Ingenuity has a problem, it’ll take those 3-4 minutes before we on Earth even know about it. So not exactly like flying a drone in Afghanistan…
Still, a very notable accomplishment.
Yeah, Mars is currently almost 2x farther away than the Sun. Good news is it’s getting closer every day. It’ll be at it’s closest in Dec 2022. But at just over.5 AU it’ll still take over 4 minutes one way to communicate with.
In FAA-speak, the “Chief Pilot” is a regulatorily required position who is the person in charge of the policies and procedures for the airline or other commercial aviation operation. He flies a desk, deals with the bureaucracy, etc. But sets the tone for how the work out in the field is done.
I’m betting NASA Ingenuity’s Chief Pilot is more about planning the operations and ensuring they operate within the mission rules and the machinery’s limitations. No planning 10 minute flights with only a 5 minute energy supply, etc.
The oxygen experiment seems to be working:
The growing list of “firsts” for Perseverance, NASA’s newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian day, or sol, since the mission landed Feb. 18.
Total Recall, here we come!
Second flight confirmed. Sideways movement and a new higher altitude! Onlt a relatively short video so far though.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-logs-second-successful-flight
That thing is really rock solid in flight. I wonder if the thin atmosphere makes it easier in a way, being much less affected by wind.
One thing’s for sure: With that rotor RPM it’ll have some insane gyro forces to counteract any wobbles.
I’ve read that wind on Mars is usually not much of an issue. Even if the velocity is high, the low pressure means the forces applied by the wind are real low. The famous “dust storms” are composed of the finest of fine particles that have almost Brownian motion in the atmosphere; gravity almost doesn’t affect them. Which is why the storms are so long-lasting.
And a cool green rock: