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Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

I still find it perplexing that one can fly a helicopter, or anything really, in such a thin atmosphere.

Especially considering one needs power which is not magical. In X-plane one can equip the plane with magical jets, but in real life?

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It is unintuitive. There's a video [1] demonstrating just how difficult it is to get moving air to do any work when you have as little air to work with as you would on Mars.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYe3sIaNHVs ("How Strong is The Wind on Mars?" by Cody'sLab)

Totally agree. It's obviously a high risk portion of the mission but I'm glad someone had the guts to propose it.

Derek from Veritasium did a nice little story on it last summer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM

What's the utility of doing this besides being cool? It is very cool, but given the weight restrictions, I'm not sure there's any clear use case for this tech besides camera drones. The article implies the aerial pictures are a secondary goal.

This particular mission is a technology proving mission, future missions will use it for forward scouting type stuff, use the copter to find best courses forward, heavier ground probe with all the experiments can take a path with the advantage of foresight. At least that's my understanding.

Rovers are unfortunately very slow, meaning they cannot cover much area, and cannot measure from very many areas simultaneously. Helicopters fill that gap. I think this paper might cover some of the motivation: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2018-0023

"There's something neat we'd like to look at, but we can't get the rover up there" seems like a likely answer.

It's a technology demonstration.

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/

There is a future mission planned to Titan called Dragonfly, it will send a rotorcraft to the surface.

Perhaps they can use the data from this mars copter to improve the odds of success with Dragonfly.

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