Perseverance is planned to be at least 60m from the flight area for observations.
Watching a New Shepherd launch from Blue Origin I realise SpaceX have made it disappointing when they don’t blow up.
Though there’s still time!
…
Nope - they stuck the landing :)
To be fair, it’s not as if the Falcon 9s blow up much these days, and the launches are still cool.
Zephyr
4296
Another feather in SpaceX’s hat:
I am eager to visit the MIL now as she lives about an hour west of their Texas launch center.
Will it come with a nice car inside, to drive around the moon?
Romalar
4298
Apparently their initial bid was (if I’m reading this right) as low as a quarter of some of the other bids. NASA warned the bidders that they all needed to reduce costs, but it seems that even after the reductions the other bidders proposed SpaceX still came up as a much cheaper option and with much more cargo space.
NASA said it wanted “to preserve a competitive environment at this stage of the HLS Program.” But it added that “NASA’s current fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.” As a result, SpaceX updated its payment schedule so that it now fits “within NASA’s current budget.”
Seems like something magical going on at SpaceX - like lack of bureaucratic inertia and lack of confidence via corruption (lobbying). Just my assumption based on much reading on the military industrial complex in the past, including aerospace.
jpinard
4300
Good question for @fire
Speaking of @fire, are you in charge of the firmware update too?
RichVR
4301
Those are great questions. You should probably ask @fire. :) Sorry.
I have it on good authority that @fire is busy thinking about fun non-rover things this weekend! Don’t be worried if a response is not immediately forthcoming.
fire
4305
fire
4306
There is no way to clean solar panels and Mars dust certainly settles on them. The MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) relied on “cleaning events” (dust storm with high winds) to clear the panels. Heli is probably doing the same, though I’m not on the project and can’t know for sure.
fire
4307
The software update was locked and loaded on the orbiter, waiting for the approval & command to send and install. If I understand correctly, the path of the image goes earth to orbiter through the Deep Space Network antennas, then orbiter to rover via “forward link,” rover to base station, and base station to helicopter. Then you reassemble and check out the image, and install it by burning it into the NOR zones holding the bootable images. Helicopter has a much smaller flight software image so it didn’t take as long to uplink to the rover as, say, the last flight software image to Curiosity. That one took a speedy 6 weeks; we had to send the binary in 49 little pieces.
fire
4308
Oh there’s also this article which made the rounds at work yesterday:
Interesting thing is that folks not on the project hear about this stuff from news sources just like you. Even folks on the project, to a large extent! Maybe it’s like that everywhere.
That sounds like a plan, except I worry that Heli would be blown away by a good storm? On the other hand, it would fly then…
Lets hope it will make many controlled flights before that happens…
