[HN Gopher] After six months on Mars, NASA's tiny copter is stil... ___________________________________________________________________ After six months on Mars, NASA's tiny copter is still flying high Author : Pikkie Score : 305 points Date : 2021-09-06 07:07 UTC (15 hours ago) (HTM) web link (phys.org) (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org) | kokey wrote: | I think people who fly tiny whoop quadcopters would find the | description of a 1.8kg copter as 'tiny' quite amusing. I'm | guessing the primary driver for the weight is the power to lift | this in the thin atmosphere, secondary to that the weight of the | strong materials used to make it durable. | azernik wrote: | Not just the power to keep it up, but also the rotors. Not sure | how heavy Earth quadcopter rotors are as a proportion of total | vehicle weight, but the Ingenuity ones are absolutely enormous. | ForHackernews wrote: | This is a good lesson in under-promise, over-deliver. NASA seem | to be masters of that technique. | ISL wrote: | I saw first-hand how it comes to pass, from collaborating with | NASA engineers years ago. | | In order to ensure that a critical mission-goal is met, with, | say, 95% confidence, every subcomponent must be _much_ more | reliable, as there will be many ways to fail. The net effect is | that often the overall perceived reliability turns out to be | much better than the requirement. | | This is especially so for systems that have already achieved | some measure of success, as a number of those subcomponents | will have already done their jobs completely. | dtech wrote: | I suspect it's because of a solid physical engineering culture. | They probably have enormous safety factors and redundancies or | work-arounds, since you can't change anything physically once | it's launched. | | So if things go alright, those provide lifespan far beyond | specifications. | Camillo wrote: | Eh, at this point it's a boy crying wolf situation. Whenever | there's a new space gizmo you know they're going to say "we | only designed it to work for eight minutes", and then six | months later it'll still be chugging along, because the actual | design life was measured in years. | | They could at least say "the doodad is designed to work for two | years, but there's a 5% chance that it'll be DOA, because so | many things can go wrong in space". That would be more | realistic. | dugmartin wrote: | The problem is people hear what they want to hear. Much like | telling a PM that a project is probably going to take 2 weeks | but might extend to 2 months. Guess which number they are | going to remember and hold you to? | II2II wrote: | Not really. They are putting experimental hardware into an | environment that is not well understood. It is also being | done by very public facing organizations with very large | budgets. They basically have to guarantee that they will | deliver what they say they will deliver. From a public | relations standpoint, it may even be easier to justify a | complete failure than an 80% success since a string of 80% | successes will look like incompetence while a few complete | failures are quickly forgotten. | fsckboy wrote: | you don't deserve to be downvoted (this place is ridiculous) | because saying that there's a "boy crying wolf" aspect is | true, and it was the whole point of learning that story which | point apparently some people missed. | | but there is also a position I'd like to point out between | the one most people here are taking ("NASA over-engineers | every part individually to avoid failures") | | and yours ("here's our reasonably expected life, but could | come up short") | | and that is: they need to set a bar that evaluates a | reasonable amount of science they need to accomplish to | justify the budget. | | It's not the minimum number ("crashed in flames but we | learned some things") | | and it's not the gloriously optimistic number ("this thing's | still going after 12 years, it's really worth it!") | | and it's not a fake marketing expectations number ("we'll | fake the budget numbers so we can razzle dazzle by blowing | past the expectations") | | rather it's just, "for X hundred million we expect to spend a | month taking pics in every direction and gathering and | analyzing some rocks from different promising places, and | that mission alone is worth it" because that's what congress | is approving | JohnJamesRambo wrote: | It is always an exercise in horrible estimates and it gets | really tiresome. If you always greatly exceed the estimate | (by orders of magnitude!) it wasn't a good estimate, it was | PR. I assume NASA has real estimates they use internally. No | one could be this bad at it and still have a job there | surely. | cheschire wrote: | I always took it to be a budget defense method since they never | get as much money as they as for, and have to expertly manage | expectations to ensure they continue getting the "little" money | they do. | | Little is quoted because it's a hotly debated and subjective | word. | amelius wrote: | > This is a good lesson in under-promise, over-deliver. NASA | seem to be masters of that technique. | | And Tesla seems to be master of the exact opposite technique | with Autopilot. | mchusma wrote: | It's far from clear that NASAs general conservative nature | has been a good thing relative to a more risk-tolerant one. | If we accepted more failure, could we accomplish a lot more? | | Particular with SpaceX on the scene, it's time to start | rethinking risk, because launch costs will be so much lower. | robin_reala wrote: | One of the most interesting things about Ingenuity is the amount | of standard open-source code used. Github has a badge for if you | contributed code to a project used by it, and they put up an | explanatory page at https://github.com/readme/featured/nasa- | ingenuity-helicopter. | jorgesborges wrote: | And a list of the repositories. Very cool. | | https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an... | eric__cartman wrote: | Having that badge would give anyone very cool bragging rights | about how they wrote software that's running on Mars. | | It makes perfect sense that NASA used a lot of open source | software for this. If some high quality, widely used and tested | code already exists, why not use it instead of trying to | reinvent everything? | robbedpeter wrote: | I once spent a week troubleshooting a pair of routers that | were part of a NASA Mars mission. They were using firmware | over a decade old at the time, which was causing issues with | the internet facing edge devices, which had automatically | updated a few weeks prior, and that started causing massive | packet loss. | | There were redundant paths with redundant hardware, and the | node I worked on wasn't particularly important, but I got a | taste of what the engineers and scientists at NASA must live | for, the sense of contributing to something historic, | profound, and deeply human. | | The fix was simple at the end, a firmware rollback and | disabling further updates, and most of the time was consumed | in conversation and carefully assessing each step and action, | but I count it as a high point in my career. Just to touch | the edge of it was special. | | The people whose code and engineering get sent to space are | contributing to the betterment of mankind, literally making | the universe a better place. Kudos to those guys. To write | code that's part of a critical system is a meaningful in a | way | dimator wrote: | I highly doubt it's running on Mars. For one thing, sibling | comment has a list of repos that have the badge, and it's a | lot of python packages. I suspect it's more along the eath- | based infrastructure and data processing side of the | equation. Still a pretty cool get, though. | stavros wrote: | Well, I just checked and I got the badge! Go me! I wonder | which of the tens of open source libraries I've written was | actually used by NASA! | | Oh, the badge tells, you... Hmm, let's see, it says | "attrs". That's not mine, I must have submitted a PR at | some point, let me find it. | | Ah, right. I changed "serious business aliases" to | "serious-business aliases" in the README. | | You guys are all welcome. | Teknoman117 wrote: | Mine was some CMake fixes for cURL when using it as a | subproject in a "superbuild" project. | stavros wrote: | Still better than adding a hyphen... | dima55 wrote: | I literally worked on the heli, but my badge came from a | documentation patch to numpy :) | heavyset_go wrote: | Apparently some of the non-mission critical experimental | components that were sent to Mars run your standard Linux | systems with some Python software, as well. I believe I | heard in an interview with a NASA engineer that they were | using Python for ML and scripting. | burundi_coffee wrote: | > If some high quality, widely used and tested code already | exists, why not use it instead of trying to reinvent | everything? | | This is precisely the spirit of free software and the | motivation behind movements like public money public code. | Govermnets immensely overpay for software (projects). | fao_ wrote: | Jesus, has it been six months already? What is this hell world. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | It's less than four months until 2022. | [deleted] | ant6n wrote: | Wait, you're on Mars too? | Incerto wrote: | It's been six months already? How time flies... | secfirstmd wrote: | Well it's been nearly 11 months in Martian time... :) | gshubert17 wrote: | But Mars takes 1.88 earth years to make one orbit. So, 6 | earth months is closer to 3/12 of a Martian year. | unknownOrigin wrote: | Yea, same reaction, I had to double check it's true. Damn, | we're getting old. | dTal wrote: | Only 4 and a bit months since its first flight though, when it | was all over the news. | unnouinceput wrote: | Quote: "NASA is planning to retrieve those samples during a | future mission--sometime in the 2030s. " | | Not if Musk gets his rocket filled with 100 people on Mars in | next years. Then you'll have a better way to do science on that | soil. | coldcode wrote: | I wonder what the upper limit on weight will be. The article | mentioned multiple kilograms being possible in the future. | _joel wrote: | Have a swarm instead/as well, much more capable at covering | range. | zokier wrote: | JPL is planning already much bigger copters: | | > The current MSH concept has a mass of about 31 kg and a total | diameter of just over four meters, with six rotors each | sporting a quartet of 0.64 meter blades | | https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-next-mars-helicopter | [deleted] | neals wrote: | Do we have any amazing pictures from it? | stohk wrote: | Ingenuity only has one downward facing color camera and b/w nav | cam. None of them are particularly amazing but its just a tech | demo. You can see all the images here, | https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ | nisegami wrote: | Seeing color pictures from another planet's surface is one of | the things that always fills me with awe. | MayeulC wrote: | Someone has used the low-FPS, downwards-pointing color camera | plus photogrammetry to reconstruct the flight environment: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX89Y766D_M | jffry wrote: | Depends on your threshold for amazing. It's a lot of pictures | of rocks since they're cameras for navigation. On the other | hand they're aerial views of another planet taken by a | helicopter during autonomous flight. | | One notable photo was on Ingenuity's third flight, where it | happened to get the Perseverance rover and landing area | together in one frame: | https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25862/ingenuity-spots-persev... | | There is also the NASA blog just covering Ingenuity, which has | some more notable photos along with explanations: | https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/ | amelius wrote: | Half of the pictures on the NASA website are rendered mockups. | I don't know which ones are real anymore. | tokai wrote: | They always write in the image description if it is an | illustration or not. | | Or use the raw image library | https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ | ilkkao wrote: | It could hover near the rover and take nice photos. But I'm | sure NASA doesn't want to take a collision risk like that. | danhor wrote: | Maybe after the shift from space-grade parts to commodity parts | in (some) satellites, this will mean the same for parts of future | mars missions. A Snapdragon 801 as used here is certainly much | cheaper, easier to work with and powerful than anything space- | grade. | solarkraft wrote: | It's also such great marketing. I wonder why the Zigbee | alliance doesn't communicate more that it's used for | communication between the rover and the helicopter. | mschuster91 wrote: | Probably because they'd get ridiculed to beyond the solar | system that they can make a Mars rover fly, but it's a | nightmare to get two Zigbee products from different vendors | to talk to each other. | pkaye wrote: | However they still use a rad-hardened FPGA to run some of the | critical aspects. This paper discusses a lot of the internals. | | https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A... | holoduke wrote: | Anyone knows if the copter suffer already from issues and | reboots already? | enkid wrote: | I believe it is much cheaper to put something in LEO then it is | to get it to Mars, so I don't know if the economics of Mars | Missions have fundamentally shifted to cheaper probes the way | they have for satellites. | XorNot wrote: | I suspect we're limited more by communications capability | then anything else: pretty much a hand-held radio will reach | up to LEO if someone's listening (short-wave definitely does | and that's off-the-shelf at consumer prices pretty much). | | Whereas Mars requires the Deep Space Network to reasonably be | able to maintain communications - so your very cheap probes | still need super-highgrade radios to be useful (the landers | for example still generally pack an antenna that can reach | all the way back to Earth even when they use uplinks - the | helicopter is relaying via the lander). | | What we're missing on Mars is reliable communications for | probes: there's no common backhaul to Earth that you can just | hook into. But I'd be willing to bet that's coming: if | Starlink works on Earth, there's no real reason it shouldn't | work on Mars. At which point you can go with the "swarm of | cheap hardware" idea because it can hand off the need for the | power, hardware and logistics and backing to communicate | inter-planetary. | [deleted] | jvanderbot wrote: | > Whereas Mars requires the Deep Space Network to | reasonably be able to maintain communications - so your | very cheap probes still need super-highgrade radios to be | useful | | That's not technically true. They maintain fancy radios | that can reach Earth as a backup. Data transfer is done via | the Mars Relay network. | | https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8861/the-mars-relay-network- | conne... | | Ingenuity uses this as well. | | > if Starlink works on Earth, there's no real reason it | shouldn't work on Mars. | | Ground-to-low orbit comms relays have been in operations | for half a century. And decades at Mars already. Starlink | is for high throughput communications from ground to ground | on the same planet with always-on connectivity and global | coverage. Their sattelites are engineered cheap and | replenished with cheap lift from SpaceX. Totally different | problem calculus at Mars and doesn't address "backhaul" to | Earth. | | You'd need longer-lived high throughput optical terminals | or better, preferably at Areostationary orbits. Checkout | work by Briedenthal and Edwards on the matter. | jessriedel wrote: | A bigger effect is that, by the time the next helicopter is | ready to launch, SpaceX Starship is likely to drop the cost of | delivering cargo to Mars by an order of magnitude or more. That | will massively disrupt the mass vs. capability trade-offs we | see in all Martian rovers and aircraft. | DrNuke wrote: | It really depends on the space environmental work conditions, | though... that's the fundamental trigger for space grade | quality. | _joel wrote: | There's also some RAD hardened components to check for bit- | flips and restart the hardware that quickly it can do it mid- | flight. | | Here's the full paper. | https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/46229/CL%2317... | ryandrake wrote: | I wonder how much hardware marketed as "space grade" (or | whatever the terminology is, I'm just a layman) is actually | as hardened using these techniques and redundant as you'd | expect. Or are they simply certified because the | manufacturer's process went through some checkboxes. In the | aviation world, for some components, the difference between | aviation grade and non- is 1. cost and 2. a Certificate of | Conformance from the manufacturer that says "this thing is | provably aviation grade, trust us bro." | flavius29663 wrote: | That is so smart. I know we're talking about NASA, but I am | still in awe. | | I read a bit of the paper, it's actually even more redundant | than what you said: | | - snapdragon is only used for higher level functions of the | flight: The SnapdragonTM processor has a 2.26 GHz Quad-core | SnapdragonTM 801 processor with 2 GB Random Access Memory | (RAM), 32 GB Flash memory, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver | Transmitter (UART), a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), | General Purpose Input/Ouput (GPIO), a 4000 pixel color | camera, and a Video Graphics Array (VGA) black-and-white | camera. This processor implements visual navigation via a | velocity estimate derived from features tracked in the VGA | camera, filter propagation for use in flight control, data | management, command processing, telemetry generation, and | radio communication. The SnapdragonTM processor is connected | to two | | - for flight control they use 2 (redundant) automotive chips | from Texas Instruments: TMS570LC43x high-reliability | automotive processor operating at 300 MHz, with 512 K RAM, 4 | MB flash memory, UART, SPI, GPIO. | | - these are all controlled by a radiation hardened board, the | 3rd level of redundancy | _joel wrote: | They also used a $129.99 altimeter from Garmin (Lidar- | Lite-V3), no fancy fancy. | https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14032 | | edit: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/general/garmin-on- | mars/ | darkwater wrote: | I'm not a space expert at all but my wild guess is that doing | small, careful tests for consumer grade hardware (and software) | to be used on Mars is a way to lower costs of a possible future | settlement, by leveraging economies of scale here on Earth. | johnwalkr wrote: | I actually just wrote the policy on this topic for a space | project I work on. | | It really depends. It's often not cheaper to use such commodity | stuff unless you can tolerate a lot of risk. A lot of normal | and automotive components are used in space, but it's mostly | simple stuff that's relatively easy to qualify. A snapdragon | cpu will basically never be fully qualified as a single | component because you cannot control each state, let alone test | it in each state (I am oversimplifying but bear with me). What | you can do is apply overcurrent detection, external watchdog | timers, redundancy and other techniques to mitigate the effects | of radiation. | | Then, you can almost fully test that mitigation in theory but | not really because it will cost you millions of dollars with | huge technical risk and the part will probably be obsoleted or | made by a different fab next time you need it. So, you choose | older proven easily-hard stuff where you can, or for anything | mission critical or related to safety. Better to just buy the | $200k rad hard cpu and save your millions. | | Then, you are left with only bonus items such as this | helicopter that simultaneously do not have many reliability | requirements (because it's not mission critical) and are not | possible with traditional space grade technology due to | performance requirements. | | "Easier to work with" is only true when you take risks too. | Yeah, you can start developing right away using a devkit and | Linux, but if you find your project needs reliability or safety | requirements, you may find you are spending person-years of | software engineering time if it's even possible at all. You | might be required for the system to be deterministic and avoid | dynamic memory allocation, for example. | | Interestingly, students making cubesats don't "know better" | yet. And while the overall failure rate is probably bad on a | per mission basis, it's probably good on a per kg or per dollar | basis. There's a ton of cubesats and cubesat payloads that have | raspberry pi's inside for Leo missions. | nisegami wrote: | From my limited knowledge of electronics-in-space, isn't ECC | memory a hard requirement to correct for bit flips due to solar | radiation/particles? But DDR5 having ECC be standard across the | board may make this a non-issue. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | Kinda, yes, but at the same time, servers here on earth have | moved away from (expensive) ECC in favor of resilient | software, disconnected services (job queue based) and | redundancy. Cheaper to have a dozen computers that sometimes | break than three with lower risk (but they still break). | zitterbewegung wrote: | For consumers no but for things like large simulations or | even deep learning you want to have ECC memory. | | Intel only enables it on Xeons but AMD doesn't officially | support it on their consumer chips but sometimes it works. | my123 wrote: | It's locked down on AMD customer APUs, only not | forcefully disabled on AMD customer CPUs that do not have | integrated graphics. (Ryzen PRO parts have it officially | supported) | 10GBps wrote: | Interesting craft in that it's essentially just a larger version | of the R/C toys you can buy. I wonder how they tested the blade | design. Did they fly it at 100,000ft on Earth? | Cthulhu_ wrote: | Didn't it also use Zigbee (for home domotics) as a control | protocol? | mkl wrote: | Veritasium has a good explainer about the development and | testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM | dtgriscom wrote: | Four words: really big vacuum chamber. | londons_explore wrote: | I assume it was tested in a pressure chamber on earth to | simulate the pressure and composition of Mars atmosphere. | | Obviously it wouldn't be able to fly in the pressure chamber | due to increased gravity, but by suspending it on elastic you | can still test that the blade functions as intended. | | The only bit you can't really fully test is the constants for | the control loops in the flight control algorithm, but I assume | they chose them with a lot of stability margin. | _Microft wrote: | It did fly in the vacuum chamber. It was a tethered flight | and the difference between Earth's and Mars's gravity was | compensated by an appropriate pull being applied to the | tether. | SideburnsOfDoom wrote: | > I assume it was tested in a pressure chamber on earth... by | suspending it on elastic you can still test that the blade | functions as intended | | They did exactly that. NASA has a big (adjustable) vacuum | chamber for this kind of purpose. | | This comment links to video: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432811 | TotempaaltJ wrote: | Just a vacuum chamber: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMCJGfwj3rY | [deleted] | Causality1 wrote: | It's incredible to me they managed to get it to fly at all | considering how thin mars' atmosphere is. | foobar1962 wrote: | > ... still flying high | | Shirley you must be joking! | jackcosgrove wrote: | Can't wait for a successor to Ingenuity to capture aerial video | during its flights. | juliendorra wrote: | About the size: the blades are really huge "in person" (in VR :-) | | I added both the Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity to our VR | puzzle game Peco Peco[0], and I was totally surprised both times | by how bigger than I thought they were. (Players can assemble the | puzzle for Ingenuity at full scale, and at both full scale and | 1/3rd of scale for the rover) | | So if you have a VR headset, I highly suggest to find a way to | discover Ingenuity at full scale in VR. | | [0] https://pecopecogame.com/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-06 23:00 UTC)