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Comment by DogestFogey | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to see how the helicopter handles potential dust storms which can have winds of up to 94 km/hr.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Effect_of_dust...

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That would be very interesting. I am pretty naive on the topic but one thing to keep in mind is that the force of martian wind is nothing like on earth as the atmosphere is around 1% as dense as ours. For reference, the winds in the Martian was one of the big literary devices used to help the story along but I don't think could actually happen

Aren't they pretty mild despite this, thanks to the very low density of the atmosphere?

They are, but this is a disaster waiting to happen anyway. Extremely high RPM, no redundancy in rotors or engines, flying in an environment full of dust and particles, having to land perfectly every time (or get damaged irreversibly), all these things add up to certain failure. It's definitely very cool, but it's not going to be nearly as reliable or useful as a land-based vehicle. Besides, aerial photos have generally little value for Mars (at least for the surface area such a drone can cover) because the atmosphere is clear and you can get great imagery from space.

So unless they want to reach an otherwise impossible to climb location, I don't see the use for it.

> Besides, aerial photos have generally little value for Mars (at least for the surface area such a drone can cover) because the atmosphere is clear and you can get great imagery from space.

I'm not buying your blanket statement. Atmosphere is not the only limitation - optics are heavy.

>optics are heavy

It depends on the optics. Modern optics for the visual range are incredibly light.

Also, since you assume optics are heavy, why do you think putting them on a drone is a good idea? You can haul a metric ton of optics in space for years (if not decades) but that drone can probably carry a handful of kg of equipment, and not that many cameras.

My point is that you can't just conclude a prior that the capabilities could be matched by an orbiter. You need bigger and thus heavier optics to match the performance of a camera on the ground from orbit. The extra mass for the drone might be less than that needed for the larger optics.

I makes me think of the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (best Sci-Fi book series ever!) where the early colonists run into a dust store (really _fines storm_ since the particulate mater is much smaller than dust and gets into everything) that lasts several years.

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