Helicopter Ingenuity’s 4th flight on Mars - Best yet
Mars doesn’t look all that different than California this year.
haha
Besides all the techno whiz bang novelty of the thing, what I find fascinating is the fact that it flies at all.
The Martian atmosphere is very thin and equivalent to Earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of 114, 829 feet.
By comparison, a passenger jet will fly as high as 43,000 feet and the SR-71 Blackbird has an operational ceiling of 85,000 feet. Some suggest the spy plane could reach 100,000 feet.
So how come we’re sending up jets up so high & not helicopters?
I’m just super impressed that we can communicate with a device some 190 million miles away. The fact that it actually is successful is even more mind-blowing.
Me thinks they already fly spy drones at the alt. I guess NASA/JPL aren’t sharing everything they know. Curious about what’s happening to the China Mars Mission
It’s called Radio Relay (narrow beam - line of sight communications) and it’s been around since the 1960’s.
Basically the same as your cell phone. Your signal is picked up by a ground station which transmits the signal to a satellite station in space (the relay) which in turn boosts the signal and returns it back to ground repeater stations over a wider area.
In space though the signal passes between orbiters around Mars and passed down to the Rovers.
Instructions are sent in a compressed computer file which will probably be unpacked on the rover and sent across to the computer on board the helicopter. A bit like downloading a TEF file and executing it in TefView.
Hey! You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to use a TEF file! 
@Banjoe, anything over 14,000 ft requires supplemental oxygen or pressurization. Commercial airliners are pressurized while SR71 crew wear essentially space suits. I don’t believe they’ve designed a helicopter for pressurized conditions or with sufficient oxygen capabilities. Of course that’s a human limitation. Drones are a different story. I’ll see a good friend on Friday who works helicopter research for the Army. I’ll ask him about high altitude copters.
T-minus 4 beats to kickoff… all systems running properly? Picks firmly in place. Kickoff, we have kickoff. Operation Old Joe Clark is underway.
…aaand, it exploded.
Cool! Chinooks in Afghanistan have done some amazing high altitude things, but still far short of 40,000 ft.
I noticed the Mars copter has duel blades. I wonder if one blade compresses the atmosphere so the other can provide lift? I’ll be interested to hear what your friend says, unless he says “It’s classified.”
Which is why we need more funding!
Quick, more tax dollars for a new banjo!
What!?! And cut the funding for Justice in Televised Sports For Malcontented People?
That’s cold. Real cold. But sometimes we just gotta make the hard decisions.
I am no expert but I think you’ll find that helicopters run on aviation fuel. Which requires a certain level of oxygen to burn. At high altitudes there a lot less oxygen there there will be a limit to the height the can fly.
Check out their website, there was much prelaunch experiments on that very topic.
Interesting, but it really doesn’t answer the question.
Powerful enough to lift off in the thin Mars atmosphere. The atmosphere of Mars is very thin: less than 1% the density of Earth’s."
It weighs 4 lbs and the rotors are 4 feet across. I know it flies, but cannot figure out “how.”
“Birds fly because they flap their wings.” While true, it’s not the whole picture.
How do those rotors generate enough lift in such a thin atmosphere?
(The Banjo Ben answer is “With practice!”)
Hi Joe, That’s why they used two rotors. I do believe they spin in opposite directions with an adjustable pitch. I think @BanjoBen would be better able to explain how flight works.
Lift occurs when the pressure on the underside of an airfoil exceeds that on the top side—kind of a duh statement. But the faster flow over the top of a cambered wing causes a lower static pressure on the top than the bottom (Bernoulli principle). But you make a great point about air breathing engines, @Archie, and the ability to create enough differential pressure, @BanJoe, in that thin atmosphere is impressive.
