NASA is sending Helicopter to Mars!! Smart or Silly?

I came across this video from NASA claiming that they were gonna fly a drone unmasked my immediate thought was no Vickers Mars has about 100 the atmosphere of Earth so how are they gonna fly in an atmosphere that thing now I've called up NASA when they've come out with before most notably when they claimed that they found a state based life well mysterious NASA press release sparking major attention they're holding a press conference this time tomorrow afternoon to announce quote an astro biological finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life and so what we think is happening what all the evidence we've collected suggests is that instead of these we'll see these these orange light orange balls disappear and represented by green balls we see that arsenic would be substituting for phosphorus and the backbone of DNA and you can see how critical this component of the DNA might be just gonna analyze some dirty samples yeah who woulda seen it coming now it's gotta be said that I've taken a look at some of NASA's early or landing and mask type sequences and thought not a chance in hell now sure I never made a video on it or anything but that's what I was thinking there was just so many things that had to happen correctly in sequence it was just crazy so take for instance Spirit and Opportunity after six months in space the first thing that you have to do is this incredibly narrow atmospheric window and lose some speed then you deploy a parachute booster heat shield descend on a rope inflate some airbags via the retros at exactly the right altitude in the second specific window then bounce around for a bit deflate the airbags maybe write the tetrahedron and then have the rover unpack itself sufficiently unbundle of the NOx that it's had that it actually rolls off the platform in a functioning form and I took a look at that and thought no way there's just so many things go wrong yeah I think that was in the back of NASA's mind too which is why they sent two of them however no both worked flawlessly then some years later Kim the Curiosity rover which was a big boy and use something called sky crane to lower itself to the surface virus of rocket suspended platform now these achievements are very impressive because of the technical challenges are packing everything that you need onto a rocket leaving it there but the best part of a year and then timed to the second everything has to go right on Mars because none of this can be joystick if you like it's all got to be automated because it best it takes about four minutes to get a radio signal to Mars and four minutes for the return so it's about eight minutes or at its worst when Mars is on the other side of the Sun it takes about 40 minutes to get a reply from Mars so all of this has to be automated which brings us to flying an automated drone on Mars yeah I'm skeptical about this one the principle problem is that Mars doesn't have much atmosphere so how are you going to produce the lift to get this off the ground help to get in an atmosphere this thin on earth you have to go up about three times the height of Everest now you are actually helped out a bit by the fact that Mars is significantly smaller than Earth and only has about one third of the gravity so you only have to produce about one third of the thrust to get something airborne however giving one third of the thrust from one hundredth of the atmosphere is challenging more on that in a moment even more challenging is this isn't like landing where it's got to go right once this has to go right again and again and again because it's gonna find multiple times with obvious challenges like the wear and tear to the rotors there's every drone pilot will tell you once these things crash and they fall over they don't take off again right you actually have to stand them up before they will fly again that's easy enough to do when you're on earth but it's gonna be one of the most infuriating things ever to have a drone for on Mars cuz it's gonna be an awful long time before anyone can stand it up to fly again right so to get the thrust helicopters typically angle their blades and then they swing them through the air batting the air molecules downwards and this produces thrust upwards and of course it slows the air down by some of the friction with the air there and you're gonna produce the most thrust when the blades are pitched at about 45 degrees you know with this very simplistic model in reality of course those air molecules are moving around like crazy this is actually a molecular dynamic simulation where so the blue stuff is nitrogen and that makes up about 80% of our atmosphere the red stuff is oxygen which makes up about 20% of our atmosphere that's the stuff that you really need to breathe to keep alive and yeah it's only one-fifth of our atmosphere and there's about 1% of argon there the pink balls and also there's a small amount of water in there from the humidity in the air but for this example I'm just gonna have the air molecules are sitting there in a static fashion so it's clearer how these things typically produce thrust the faster you spin the blades the more lift you generate and the lower the air pressure the less air molecules are blade hits and the less lift it creates now many of you will know that helicopters can't fly very high but this is a combination of two factors first of all the rotors simply can't spin fast enough and more importantly there isn't enough air to run the engines just let people need that oxygen to burn fuel and create energy engines need oxygen to burn fuel and create thrust so as you go up and the atmosphere becomes thinner the oxygen content of the air becomes less and eventually gets so dilute you just can't run an internal combustion engine on it thankfully this isn't a problem with small electric craft electric engines don't need that oxygen to burn fuel to create thrust because they've got all the energy they need in the batteries in principle the only thing that limits how high an electric helicopter can fly is if it can mechanically spend by it's fast in our in the thinning air there certain less of course you actually need the air for cooling that's a different story now at this point you might be saying hey if this is all true why don't we have electric helicopters or electric planes the simple answer is batteries suck as a way of storing energy with something like 40 times less energy density than gasoline you know a new typical airliner is 30 percent by mass gasoline there is simply no way you could pack that much energy into batteries and even if you could they would be so insanely dangerous you would never put them on an aircraft so let's just say for an example that the revolutions per second you need to produce thrust to fly on earth with this drone is one at one atmosphere if you go up to where this half of the atmosphere the blades need to spin twice as fast to produce the same lift and shake up to where there's one hundredth of the atmosphere you need to spin the blades about 100 times as fast now that's most notably a problem in the forces that it's gonna put on the bearings and the blades so on mass wear helped out a bit by the fact there there's only one third at the gravity on Mars that they were us on earth so we only need to maybe spin the blades 30 times faster and of course you could make the blades much bigger so you don't have to spin them as fast so how fast the blades have to spin to produce lift they have to spin at about 2400 rpm to provide lift so how would 2400 rpm say compared to a regular RC helicopter with about the same blade length [Music] so the RPM that they're looking at isn't that far off what you can get off a regular remote-control helicopter with comparable blade lengths so the numbers that they're looking at really aren't them inaccessible here it looks like what they're mostly done is hugely increase the surface area of the blades such that they don't have to get crazy rpms out of the rotors and it's gonna be a fascinating craft that probably won't be able to fly on earth at all anywhere outside of the vacuum chamber where they test it come like the luenell Honda could only land on the moon it couldn't actually land on earth now NASA claims they've had mock-ups of these things flying in a vacuum chamber at about the right pressure and I can believe that even if the thing is clearly tethered by a safety wire now NASA's spectra this thing is gonna weigh about a kilo and the mass the total mass including everything the rotors and everything it has to live and the camera everything is approximately one kilogram which is very comparable to a drone that they have on the DJI website so this commercial drone weighs about 1 kilo what sort of power does it need to fly well the battery carry some 68 watt hours of power which is about one quarter of a million joules and will run for about 23 minutes which is about 1400 or so seconds meaning that while this thing is in the air it's pulling now about a hundred and seventy watts and I'm gonna say that you need about comparable amounts of power to produce comparable amounts of lift using electric motors because it's got a bigger blades on the motor that sort of thing now NASA reckons that when they're drones in the air it's gonna be running at about 200 watts the power that is gonna consume which by the way it has to generate on its own through the solar panels and charge the batteries inside is 220 watts which seems very generous especially when you consider you only need about one third of the energy to fly on Mars that you do on earth right so the system is designed to fly for two to three minutes every day there's a solar panel on the top and that provides us enough energy for that short flight as well as to keep us warm through the night so let's see if they can actually get that power they want 220 watts for a two-minute flight every day so they need about 26,000 jewels from somewhere the solar panel layer planned pretty skeptical about that this is a 40 watt panel that's when it's pointing straight at the Sun and tracking it for the whole day it generates about a consistent 40 watts let's just say that a solar panel that tracks the Sun has a 100 percent efficiency for comparison now if you don't track this I used to have a fixed solar panel then you lose about half of that potential that is your solar panel is now operating only at 50% relative efficiency and if you light flat on the ground as you would in Sep you're now down to about 30% efficiency by this simple act of geometrically laying these panels down flat on the ground you are throwing away about 60% 2/3 of their potential power generating capability and what's true for solar roadways here on earth is also true for solar panels on drones on Mars so if this solar panel were actually on the drone it would generate about 1/3 of its maximum power which averaged over the daylight hours is about 13 watts however you know the sun's only in the sky for half of the day so averaged over the whole day it only on average produces about 7 watts then of course you're on Mars so Mars only get about 1/2 the solar flux that you get at earth meaning that your solar panels will generate about half of this power so you're now looking at an average continuous power from a solar panel this size of about 3 watts on a typical Martian day so given that a Martian day and an earth they are almost exactly the same length this means that over a whole day a panel like this on average would produce some quarter of a million joules that's about 10 times what they need for their two-minute flight or alternatively to get only the right amount for their two-minute flight they would need a solar panel about 1/10 of this size which seems about right for what they have in their designs that being said I'm still really skeptical they're not out of the woods yet you see if I was a guessing man I'd say that when the temperature drops the batteries or some other critical components freeze I've hats good night sweet prince for your helicopter now NASA's not idiots they're going to coot this whole thing with insulation thermal design we don't this is not an accurate design just giving in you an idea that inside the chassis you see right we have the aerogel but inside all that electronics are actually in a very small cube I think it's about a seven centimeter per side cube so all the chips all the batteries submerge I Rose excels I love that have to fit in there but you've still got to heat it as it leeches the heat out and that requires power because if your helicopter freezes it's dead and on the flip side of this when the things running when it's actually in the air it's generating heat like crazy running CPUs and so forth and now the whole thing is covered in insulation there's nowhere to dump the heat so this thing may well be walking a heat-flow tightrope now sure there were several fairly simple workaround seams I had some thermal mass to give it some thermal inertia but that makes the whole thing heavier and bear in mind that this whole thing has to weigh less than about a kilo further I've got doubts that they can reduce the power consumption this much I mean the thing sits on the ground for almost the entire day bleeding away heat the whole time and it's got to do some fairly heavy calculations to fly itself and land as well as the need to transmit data this whole device even if it had a solar panel on it this size has to run on about three watts that's only enough energy to continuously run a light bulb like this now the biggest panel leg and probably mount on this quadcopter is a third of this size they're looking at probably trying to run this whole thing on one watt of continuous power which if you take a look at the most recent mock-ups seems to be about what they've gone for a panel about third the size of my 40 watt panel here on earth which will probably be the most ambitious part of the project to continuously power a craft like this of just one watt I mean just for a reference the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers at their prime were producing about 30 watts of power continuously and the Curiosity rover which had a radioisotope generator pulled in some hundred watts of electrical power I'm skeptical you're gonna be able to keep this system alive with that sort of power so I've got lots of experience in flying drones in difficult places in fact believe it or not I was actually really into flying drones some time ago when you actually had to make them yourself [Music] one thing this drone absolutely won't be doing is doing any interesting flying whatsoever it's gonna be straight up across and down again nothing fancy nothing risky cuz you can't just put it together again if he crashes he'll be absolutely no flag like this so can they do it maybe will they have a long life probably not raiveer is a relatively simple I have Co lots of load carrying capacity and plenty of time to make decisions at 1 centimeter per minute for this helicopter I reckon they've got coin-flipping chances of being able to solve the power issue within the weight requirements another coin-flipping chance that it will never make it to Mars in a flyable condition and even if it gets there I reckon you've got Queen flippin type chances that it won't last longer than a week risky as hell which is also pretty much nasa's assessment it's high-risk high-reward stuff but it all checks out there's nothing clearly stupid so yeah from immediate scepticism about this NASA helicopter after running the numbers it more or less checks out now I reckon could need a bigger solar panel in probably about three times this size because honestly I just can't see them running all of this on an effective continuous power supply of less than 1 watt although I would give NASA a word for advice you know as someone who's got some modest experience flying craft like this seal the motors else the very powerful need any magnets in those motors tend to pick up the magnetic dust [Music] you've lost power and of course you can't hear with the motors running or not because of the roar of the sea so I was doing a nice even fly by the whatever and it started losing power when I try to put power nothing happened over which point you're screwed because you would try and turn you lose altitude and well anyway it managed to land out of the scene but a wave then came in and waxed it so why did this happen well I think part of the clue comes from the type of sand so this is what a normal motor should sound like yeah and this is what the motor sounds like on that crash and if you look in the motor what you actually find is it's coated with black it's the sand and you can't wash it off to save your life it's magnetic black sand and when they pick up enough of it the motor fails and your craft crashes and if you're in a kind of dusty environment it's maybe something you should think about gonna admit I would also replace that solar panel from a plate to a mild cone because their plate the dust will just accumulate on it and the solar panel will lose efficiency if however it's a gentle cone sure you'll lose some efficiency on a solar panel but on the upside every time the drone flies the dust will shake off the cone just a thought but that's the way it is many times in science it's not the destination but the journey I think there are places in the solar system where it would be absolutely fantastic for helicopters Titan being one of them you know cause it's about the size of the moon so it's got very low gravity and quite a thick atmosphere the downside is of course how would you power it because out at Saturn you're about 10 times further away from the Sun than the earth so well the time you get out to Saturn there's only about one hundredth of the solar flux and will there be any pioneer proposing to explore the solar system using solar panels out as far as Saturn a wildly enough yes there is but this system really gives gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the greater solar system so you can actually travel out to the kaepa belt or the Oort cloud I wouldn't recommend this for interstellar journeys but this this this basic system provided we have filling stations along the way is means full access to the entire greater solar system this is what bugged me I took a look at this helicopter project with all sorts of skepticism but it more or less all checked out it's not fundamentally stupid picturing your spacecraft out it's a turd using solar panels is just fundamentally stupid it doesn't even pass high school levels of inspection you know if these solar panels generate some 200 kilowatts when they're by the earth that means that by the time they get out to Saturn they're generating about 2 kilowatts of power meaning that you have to sustain everyone on that spaceship with less than the power it takes to run a kettle but it gets worse than that because at the end of his presentation he chews people getting off his magnificent spaceship onto Europa problem with that is Europa is right in the middle of Jupiter's screamingly radioactive Van Allen belts within hours everyone there would experience radiation sickness and within about 12 hours that would have all been fatally exposed to radiation and it just looked like kind of a melon who doesn't really know what they're talking about when you then go on to explain how radiation in space isn't that big of deal in Mars or elsewhere oh sure I mean my view on the radiation thing is that there's suddenly some risk of radiation but it's not it's not it's not deadly there'll be some slight increased risk of cancer but it's it's I think relatively minor when you sat in front of a picture where everyone traveling on your sources to be exploring rocket has just been exposed to a fatal dose of radiation so actually the radiation thing is it's often brought up but I think it's not not too big of a deal so if you enjoyed that give this video a thumbs up and for more like it hit the subscribe button and if you really like this you can support this channel directly through patreon and I'll leave the links below [Music]

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 412,428

Rating: 4.6885257 out of 5

Keywords: nasa, mars, helicopter, thunderf00t, crazy, engineering, physics, astronomy, chemistry, drone, flight, 2020

Id: 2xSDBNzAtPs

Length: 24min 21sec (1461 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 11 2018