NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, originally intended for five flights in early '21, has kept going. Ingenuity is in that rare state where every flight is a record of some sort, even if only just the flight number. Last week's flight, number 63, was particularly noteworthy.
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity conducted its 63rd Mars flight on Thursday (Oct. 19), covering 1,901 feet (579 meters) of ground in the process.
That was "its longest distance since Flight 25," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages Ingenuity's mission, said via X (formerly Twitter) on Monday (Oct. 23).
Flight 25, which occurred on April 8, 2022, covered 2,310 feet (704 m). That's the miniature helicopter's single-flight distance record, followed by 2,051 feet (625 m) on Flight 9 in July 2021, making flight 63 third place in ranking the flight distances.
Flight stats taken from screen captures of JPL's Flight Log page.
You'll note the duration was 142.6 seconds, height was 39 feet and speed was 14.1 mph. The records in those categories are 169.5 seconds, 66 feet and 22.4 mph according to the flight log. A rather long way of saying the only record was being the 63rd flight, but nothing else about it was record-setting. And that's just fine.
Photo from Ingenuity on flight 63, in Jezero Crater. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
After Ingenuity's first five flights, aimed at proving it could actually fly in Mars' thin atmosphere, the little ship was given a mission. The 4 pound chopper is working as a scout for the life-hunting, sample-collecting, Perseverance rover mission.
So, even on Mars, the persistence of equating force (pounds) with mass (kilograms) using earth-normal gravity persists? On Mars, Ingenuity weighs about 1.52 pounds.
ReplyDeleteWhen a person says a thing is "four pounds", the implication is that's Earth normal gravity. If a blue dress looks brown under the red lights in a bar, you wouldn't tell the cops to look for a girl in a brown dress after she shoots you and storms off.
DeleteBesides, nothing in the quote suggests that the author wasn't referring to pounds-mass. He didn't say "The probe, that weighs four pounds, conducted..."
I'm heavily didactic myself, Jed, and known as a Grammar Nazi, but the evidence for correction just isn't present in this case. That said, I do wish sometimes that the public was familiar with using pounds-mass and pounds-force (or the metric equivalent) appropriately. Just saying "pounds" is ambiguous, but not wrong.
Here endeth the over-loquacious response. Clearly, I need to crawl over to the pot and make some coffee.
Jed, being a good Engineer means that you describe things properly, concisely, and correctly. Context is super-important in today's technologically-based society/culture.
DeleteIf I said, correctly, "You must have a memory leak, check your heap allocation and control" would you have the slightest clue what I was talking about? Context is important, so I wouldn't say anything like this to an Average Joe unless I knew (or thought) (s)he was well-versed in advanced programming!
So, I'm not dissing on you here, but... "Work with me here!"
/RANT OFF
"pounds-mass"? Are you trying to refer to the slug? Does this make me even more didactic? Yes, if the dress looked brown to me, that's what I'd tell the cops, absent prior knowledge about it's "true" color, which is something of a misnomer. Ooops, almost got didactic again.
ReplyDeleteYes, I would have a clue about what you were talking about. But then my favorite days from jobs past was when I was writing assembly language.
No issues working with you here - I recognize the styling of the blockquote. And good engineering would be not mixing different types of units as if they were the same thing. Just one of my many pet peeves. :)
I've come to the conclusion, BTW, that the vast majority of people really don't want to learn proper English, so being a spelling or grammar "nazi" is a fool's errand.
Hah! Assembly language (6502, 680xx, 808x, several custom military processors here) indeed. Perhaps it is the ability to do that which focuses the mind on the necessary of precise semantics.
DeleteWhat? no 1802 experience??
DeleteAh, don't get too concerned about units, every area of expertise has it's own jargon about these. Precious metals has to my knowledge has at least three different weight systems. Liquid volume measurement has three I know of and several more I have seen mentioned. If the unit is in unclear, ask then be prepared for more information than you want or need.
ReplyDeleteQED
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