this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
1278 points (98.2% liked)
memes
14480 readers
2418 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I saw an interesting video about the first drone that flew on Mars. They programmed the flights in advance and it then executed them autonomously. I think that is even more impressive, since it would not have been possible to intervene if something went wrong. At the time the data was received, the drone already landed
It's pretty amazing our first try at a fully autonomous helicopter on another planet flew and landed successfully 71 times. Rest in peace, Ingenuity.
Built with such a tiny budget that they used cell phone parts
IIRC that was part of the mission? They wanted to push themselves to see what could and could not be done with a very strict budget and cheap commonly available parts and tools.
It worked surprisingly well
They blasted a bunch of phone hardware with radiation and picked the ones that held up
They then build a custom Linux system and called it a day
That’s basically what spin launch did. They went and bought just consumer parts (not even the ones NASA could get/build) and put them into their centrifuge.
What's the word with spinlaunch these days? I feel like I've been seeing hype videos for like a decade and not a single article about progress/achievement/contracts.
Just this month they broke a 2 year silence.
Linky
That's actually super exciting! I'd be glad to see a player other than SpaceX make headway in the industry. Thanks for the reply!
It’s interesting and I love seeing the “payload yeeter” start to actually get traction, but iirc there is downsides. It’s not like you can just launch any old thing, the payload needs to survive more Gs and it only replaces the first stage. So still need fuel and propulsion.
So many interesting “hype” things either get lost due to development, or not panning out. So it’s always great to see when they “succeed”.
And that's using the same hardware as you have in your phone. Not similar, the same.A snapdragon 801. Such as used in Galaxy S5, from 2014.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_devices_using_Qualcomm_Snapdragon_systems_on_chips
https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2021/04/23/smartphone-chip-powered-nasas-historic-flight-mars
It's kinda mind-blowing that the same hardware from my trusty s5 (that is currently gathering dust in a drawer somewhere, rip) powered flight of a drone on Mars.
All of that with no GPS to get the location of the drone. They relied on a camera under the drone to basically act like an optical mouse sensor to follow the location of the drone.
I am not downplaying the supreme engineering of the mars rover team, especially because there is no GPS on mars, but DJI has pre-programmed drone flights that work with their consumer drones, called missions.
https://developer.dji.com/doc/mobile-sdk-tutorial/en/basic-introduction/basic-concepts/missions.html
I've been thinking about setting up a mission for my drone to fly every week to gather data about what my neighborhood is like throughout the year.
Well they used a camera to track features on the ground for navigating, but then flew into a sandy area with to few features and crashed xD To be fair it was never intended to leave the initially planned area in the first place. And they made the most out of it, the drone is now a lil weather station reporting temp and pressure
The rovers themselves have to do the entire landing (called EDL in NASA speak) autonomously. The process takes 11 minutes so, likewise, by the time we hear the report that EDL has started the rover is already on the ground.