this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Space

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Am I the only one who wishes this post was just the video in question rather than an entire news article about it with a broken video player.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've always been amazed those small blades can make enough lift in the thin martian atmosphere

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Here's a picture of a to-scale model to emphasize what the other comment is saying - Ingenuity isn't that small, and also remember that Mars' surface gravity is only about 40% of Earth's.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

The blades total length are 1.2m. Not that small really.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

~5x faster rpm than a similarly sized rotor could reach on earth.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Of course it's rare, how many helicopters are there on Mars?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

This is so cool when you think about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is this the first flight of this drone? Or just a random one?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's the great site about it's mission and stats!

This was its Ingenuity's 55th flight, originally the goal was to get "up to" 5 demo flights!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

With its tech demo complete, Ingenuity transitions to a new operations demonstration phase to explore how future rovers and aerial explorers can work together.

aka, we never expected to get this many flights, without killing it, and we've run out of ideas for it. "Hey, Perseverance want to see some tricks?"