[HN Gopher] After six months on Mars, NASA's tiny copter is stil...
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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/
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