Drones Take on New Civilian and Military Roles – By John Breeden II (Nextgov) / June 2 2021
Plus, an update on the military’s flying cars.
This week I thought I might have jinxed the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. In my last column, I wrote about how Ingenuity, and robots in general, often overperformed in their roles as space explorers, meaning that we may not need to risk the lives of human astronauts anytime soon. Ingenuity was designed to accomplish a single proof-of-concept mission to show that flight on Mars was possible. At the time of my previous column, it had already accomplished five flights, complete with full video accompanying each one, and was getting ready to assist the Perseverance Rover with Mars exploration.
Then the helicopter almost crashes on its sixth flight. Even if Ingenuity had crashed, its mission would have still been successful at this point, but I’m glad that it made it back to the ground safely after a very wild ride.
NASA discovered what went wrong and I’m sure they are working to correct it. One key issue is that flying a drone on Mars is not like controlling one zipping around a park on Earth. Lack of atmosphere aside, the biggest hurdle is the fact that it takes between five and 20 minutes for a signal to reach Mars, and the same amount of time for Ingenuity to report back. So it’s not like watching your helicopter weave around trees on Earth and making course corrections as needed. Instead, NASA needs to program the flight ahead of time and then hope the onboard systems and their pre-flight instructions mesh to perform a successful mission.
CONTINUE > https://www.nextgov.com/ideas/2021/06/drones-take-new-civilian-and-military-roles/174430/
