Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/25/ingenuity-helicopter-broken.html
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“was i good drone?”
the best!
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One day this little scamp will be in the Smithsonian Mars Museum with its dinged-up rotor and all.
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One of its rover pals will come by and fix it up, or at least play happy birthday to it.
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There will be a 300 year memorial where the Martian president presents the middle school class that reconstructed the rover so that it could fly again.
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The cause of the communications dropout and the helicopter’s orientation at time of touchdown are still being investigated.
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And this is why, imho, manned space programs should exist. While the helicopter is great and all, it’s now grounded for what sounds like fairly minor damage, and probably from what the article says due to a lack of control during a critical landing. If we had people over on Mars, this would probably be a quick fix – repair or replace the blade, maybe 3d print a new one, give it a good once-over and set it back on its task. Instead we have an $80 million probe that will give us some excellent data on that one area, but never move on its own again. Certainly not a waste of money or effort, but it could have been so much more.
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If the primary task for the humans was to fix broken machines then it’s very hard for me to imagine that the logistics required to get people there and keep them alive could possibly ever be cheaper than just sending replacement machines, or building them to last longer. Besides, this thing was just an experimental proof-of-concept that outlasted expectations by quite a bit.
There may be compelling reasons to send humans to Mars but personally I don’t thing that “rover repair technician” will ever make sense financially.
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You should see how little damage it takes to render a human being permanently nonfunctional in a hostile alien environment.
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Alien with robot probes is a short film about a woman struggling to write up findings when Jonesy keeps interrupting her.
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Lasted waaaay longer than any of the drones I ever tried to fly!
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… Let’s call the whole thing off!
It seems worth mentioning, along those lines, that the helicopter continued to operate, for a time, once autumn and winter rolled around and it no longer had the power to keep its heaters and computer running overnight.
There were considerable inconveniences associated with it losing its RTC and rebooting in confusion every morning; and it was expected that repeatedly hitting -80 would kill the electronics or the battery sooner or later(as temperature problems have other probes in the past); but it dealt with “I guess you just don’t get climate control anymore” considerably more gracefully than a human would.
Humans look reliable, in no small part, because the minimum buy-in in terms of logistics and production values required to avoid having them just die is so much higher; while nobody wants a robot to fail, shipping isn’t cheap or common; but it’s totally acceptable to toss one in with no exit strategy, little or no redundancy, and margins of safety so small that you expect them to be exceeded in relatively short order.
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