this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 166 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (15 children)

Considering it was just meant to be a proof of concept and only fly once or twice I would say that 71 flights, a max altitude of 78 ft(24 m), and 10.6 miles or 17 kilometers of travel, not to mention all of the footage from its on board cameras, makes Ingenuity an astounding success.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago (7 children)

Especially considering the use of off-the-shelf Snapdragon 801.

There's some nice discussion about Ingenuity here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26177619

...This processor will have not flips on Mars, possibly up to every few minutes. Their solution is to hold two copies of memory and double check operations as much as possible, and if any difference is detected they simply reboot. Ingenuity will start to fall out of the sky, but it can go through a full reboot and come back online in a few hundred milliseconds to continue flying.
-jhurliman

[–] [email protected] 51 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Reboot mid flight is a funny solution

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Imagine telling an airline pilot to just reboot the whole plane if something goes wrong.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

During a flight is a bit much, but some aircraft have a reboot between flights as a standard procedure to fix glitches that would happen if the plane was left on for the entire time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Nothing that high level. Different systems are running independently, some may be redundant to each other in case one fails. But run something long enough especially in extreme conditions and things can drift from the baselines. If a power off and on regularly prevents that it's a lot easier than trying to chase down gremlins that could be different each time they pop up for different reasons.

Even NASA I believe has done such resets from Apollo through the unmanned probes from time to time. Mentioning Windows, the newest versions don't really do this baseline reset if you just shut them down, even if you disable the hibernate/sleep modes, while a restart does.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

"Tower, we have some problems"
"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

You'd be surprised. We only do that on the ground, though.

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