Mars is hard

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Re: Mars is hard

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Re: Mars is hard

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Re: Mars is hard

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Re: Mars is hard

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The little guy failed to take off for his 4th flight.

Mars helicopter Ingenuity misses takeoff for 4th flight on Red Planet
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Re: Mars is hard

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On Friday (probably) China will test how hard Mars is.
China is about to attempt its first Mars landing - a feat accomplished successfully by only half the spacecraft that have ever tried.

Tianwen-1, as the mission is called, means "questions to heaven." It aims to be the first Mars mission to send a spacecraft into the planet's orbit, drop a landing platform onto the Martian surface, and deploy a rover all in one expedition.

The first steps are complete. The mission launched in July 2020 and the spacecraft slipped into orbit around Mars in February. Now the orbiter is preparing to release a capsule carrying the lander and rover. It must plummet through the Martian atmosphere and deploy a parachute, then release the lander, which should fire downward-facing thrusters to lower itself to the Martian surface. If that all goes well, the Tianwen-1 lander will later deploy a two-track ramp for the six-wheeled rover to roll down onto Martian soil.
Godspeed, Tianwen-1.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Did the little flying bug ever lift off again?
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Re: Mars is hard

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Daehawk wrote: Thu May 13, 2021 11:30 pm Did the little flying bug ever lift off again?
Yes. It completed it first one-way trip recently:
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8942/nasas-i ... -way-trip/
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Re: Mars is hard

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Oh good! Im hoping they get a lot more use out it than they think they will. Unless some nocturnal Martian flying creature snatches it from the skies.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Success! China's rover survived landing.

The linked story includes an egregious error, though: "To date, Nasa has successfully landed three Mars probes, the latest being the Perseverance which landed in February." Let's count: Vikings 1 and 2, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity, Phoenix (remember that one? I didn't), Curiosity, InSight, and Perseverance. Even if you only count rovers, that's five.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Loved the Vikings and Pathfinder/Sojourner.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Ginny flies again.
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter has defied expectations on Mars once again, flying 350 feet south to land in totally new territory.

For the second time, the tissue-box-sized drone flew to a new landing site, hovered above ground that its navigation cameras had never seen before, then gently lowered itself to touchdown. NASA only had information about the new area from its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which images the red planet from space. The orbiter's pictures indicated that the spot was flat and should be safe for landing.
...
NASA hasn't said how many more times Ingenuity may fly.

"We're in a kind of see-how-it-goes phase," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said.
Image
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Re: Mars is hard

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Image

The Zhurong rover dropped a remote camera and rolled back to take this selfie with its landing platform. There are also some orbital photos of the landing site at the link showing where some jettisoned pieces landed, courtesy of the Tianwen-1 orbiter.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Honestly, that thing is adorable!
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Re: Mars is hard

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And now I can’t stop humming ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’
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Re: Mars is hard

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Meanwhile, Percy takes a good look around Jezero. Scroll with your mouse.

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Re: Mars is hard

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Ginny now has eight flights under her rotors, and could keep taking a couple of flights a month for several more months, each more ambitious than the last. Like almost everything that NASA lands, I'll bet she soldiers on for years if they don't push her a little too far.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Was hoping it would make video of the horizon and what it can see from higher up....not look straight down at the ground.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Remember that Ginny is a technology demonstrator. They should keep pushing her until she breaks, because that's how you find boundaries. I'm 100% sure that every future Mars rover will have an aerial scout, but Ginny wasn't designed to do that. Her mission was accomplished the first time she left the ground.

And yes, Ginny is a she. We're not sure how Percy identifies.
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Re: Mars is hard

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If you have a pair of blue/red 3D glasses, give this remarkable image of an unremarkable location a gander.

Image

(I kept an old pair of paper 3D glasses branded GobblePalooza, whatever that was.)
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Re: Mars is hard

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Kraken wrote: Wed Aug 04, 2021 11:02 pm(I kept an old pair of paper 3D glasses branded GobblePalooza, whatever that was.)
I have a couple of pairs of paper 3D glasses at my desk. I can't remember the last time I used them for anything other than APOD or similar images.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Percy watches Ginny's 13th flight back in September.

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Re: Mars is hard

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I have some red/blue 3D glasses in my 3D Mars book. But I dont know where that book is.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Kraken wrote: Fri Nov 19, 2021 12:16 am Percy watches Ginny's 13th flight back in September.
Wow. Wasn't the original expectation that they might get just four or five flights before failure?
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Re: Mars is hard

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Holman wrote: Mon Nov 22, 2021 5:37 pm
Kraken wrote: Fri Nov 19, 2021 12:16 am Percy watches Ginny's 13th flight back in September.
Wow. Wasn't the original expectation that they might get just four or five flights before failure?
Yup. It was a technology demonstrator with only four increasingly ambitious hops planned (which is why it's barely instrumented beyond what it needs to navigate). Now they're finding it invaluable for route planning.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Ingenuity sets an altitude record on its 35th (!) flight.

46 feet up.
Saturday's flight was the first for Ingenuity since Nov. 22 and just the second it has performed since a major software update. That update, which took several weeks to install, "provides Ingenuity two major new capabilities: hazard avoidance when landing and the use of digital elevation maps to help navigate," mission team members wrote in a blog post late last month.
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Re: Mars is hard

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More records on Ginny's 49th (!) flight
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper reached a top speed of 14.5 mph (23.3 kph) and a maximum altitude of 52.5 feet (16 meters) on Sunday, according to the mission's flight log (opens in new tab). The previous records were 13.4 mph (21.6 kph) and 46 feet (14 m), respectively.
...
Over the course of its 49 Mars flights to date, Ingenuity has stayed aloft for a total of 86.7 minutes and covered 6.974 miles (11.224 km) of Red Planet ground, according to the flight log. Perseverance's odometer, meanwhile, currently reads 10.67 miles (opens in new tab) (17.17 km).
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Re: Mars is hard

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Y'know all those rock samples Percy is so carefully choosing and packaging for return to Earth? That return mission just got a lot more expensive.
According to two sources familiar with the meeting, the Program Manager for the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Richard Cook, and the director of the mission at NASA Headquarters, Jeff Gramling, briefed agency leaders last week on costs. They had some sobering news: the price had doubled. The development cost for the mission was no longer $4.4 billion. Rather, the new estimate put it at $8 to $9 billion.

Moreover, this only represents the cost to build and test the different components of the mission. It does not include launch costs, operating costs over a five-year period, nor construction of a new sample-receiving facility to handle the rocks and soil from Mars. All told, the total cost of the Mars Sample Return mission is now about $10 billion.
The development cost is approaching $1B/year, and it's likely to take more years than JPL is saying. This threatens to muscle out much of NASA's science budget.
The biggest issue these officials have is that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has never built a lander this large or complex in-house. With a mass of 3.4 metric tons, it is far larger than anything NASA or any other space agency has landed on Mars. NASA says that, when fully extended, the lander will be 7.7 meters wide and 2.1 meters tall—about the size of a two-car garage.

Much of this mass will consist of fuel due to the lander's size and its need to land very near the Perseverance rover. The NASA sources questioned why the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is taking on such a massive project when there are already workforce issues there, and much of the facility's staff will be tied up with the Europa Clipper project through most of 2024.

Due to these reasons, and the complexity of the program, it is almost certain that the launch date will slip to 2030 and very probably later. This means that if the program is costing $1 billion a year, or even more, it will continue to blow a major hole in NASA's planetary science budget, which is about $3 billion a year, for the remainder of this decade.

And these probably are not the end of the cost increases. This mission has not even reached the "preliminary design review" stage, a formal analysis of the mission and its design. Many planetary missions experience cost growth after that, including the Curiosity and Perseverance missions sent to Mars.
Eh, we've seen this before with the JWST, and it was ultimately worth it. That program's cost and delays are a footnote now that it's delivering amazing science.
The biggest issue these officials have is that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has never built a lander this large or complex in-house. With a mass of 3.4 metric tons, it is far larger than anything NASA or any other space agency has landed on Mars. NASA says that, when fully extended, the lander will be 7.7 meters wide and 2.1 meters tall—about the size of a two-car garage.

Much of this mass will consist of fuel due to the lander's size and its need to land very near the Perseverance rover. The NASA sources questioned why the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is taking on such a massive project when there are already workforce issues there, and much of the facility's staff will be tied up with the Europa Clipper project through most of 2024.

Due to these reasons, and the complexity of the program, it is almost certain that the launch date will slip to 2030 and very probably later. This means that if the program is costing $1 billion a year, or even more, it will continue to blow a major hole in NASA's planetary science budget, which is about $3 billion a year, for the remainder of this decade.

And these probably are not the end of the cost increases. This mission has not even reached the "preliminary design review" stage, a formal analysis of the mission and its design. Many planetary missions experience cost growth after that, including the Curiosity and Perseverance missions sent to Mars.
The article goes on to recommend some changes to the program, such as moving some responsibilities away from JPL to private entities. It's worth reading the whole article. Conclusion:
Zurbuchen said that if the price is escalating toward $10 billion at this early stage in the mission, NASA should think long and hard about whether this is worth the cost.

"If the answer is this is not the decade to do it, my heart breaks because I put so much effort into it," he said. "But it is better to not do it than to torch the whole science community. We have to have the courage to say no. That’s the only way we earn the right to say yes."
This is a big deal because sample return is the centerpiece of NASA's Mars program for the next decade. But one has to wonder if we're reaching the point of diminishing returns for robotic missions. Maybe a billion bucks a year would be better spent toward sending scientists to Mars than sending Mars to scientists?
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Re: Mars is hard

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Let’s start with sending Elon to Mars.
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Re: Mars is hard

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From the video Kraken posted Im surprised that little rover isn't covered in red dust.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Followup to the previous Ars story: The Senate just lobbed a tactical nuke at Mars Sample Return
NASA had asked for $949 million to support its Mars Sample Return mission, or MSR, in fiscal year 2024. In its proposed budget for the space agency, released Thursday, the Senate offered just $300 million and threatened to take that amount away.

"The Committee has significant concerns about the technical challenges facing MSR and potential further impacts on confirmed missions, even before MSR has completed preliminary design review," stated the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee in its report on the budget.

The committee report, obtained by Ars, noted that Congress has spent $1.739 billion on the Mars Sample Return mission to date but that the public launch date—currently 2028—is expected to slip, and cost overruns threaten other NASA science missions.

Further, the report states that the $300 million allocated to the Mars mission will be rescinded if NASA cannot provide Congress with a guarantee that the mission's overall costs will not exceed $5.3 billion. In that case, most of the $300 million would be reallocated to the Artemis program to land humans on the Moon.
The article goes on to explain that this is just one step in the budgeting process and the House might disagree.
This is not the final word in the budgetary process. The US House will also set its budget priorities for the coming year, and then the House and Senate will negotiate a final budget for the coming fiscal year. That will be one important point this fall.

Another will be the work of an "Institutional Review Board" convened by NASA to assess the sample return mission and to make recommendations for its success. The board is led by Orlando Figueroa, a retired deputy center director for science and technology at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the group will publicly release a report in late August or September.

It seems likely that this independent review board will provide guidance to NASA and Congress on whether the sample return mission, as designed, is affordable or whether it needs substantial changes or should be canceled entirely.
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Re: Mars is hard

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RIP Ingenuity
Ingenuity, the small helicopter that’s been buzzing around the Red Planet for almost three years, has taken its final flight. NASA announced today that at least one of the helicopter’s carbon fiber rotor blades was damaged during its last mission, grounding it for good.
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Re: Mars is hard

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They should just firewall the throttle and let it go out on its own terms.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Looking at the reference scale, I'm surprised at how large Perseverance is compared to a human.

It's going to kick our asses when it goes Von Neumann and starts self-replicating.
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Re: Mars is hard

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I'm actually sad about hearing this, especially since they just had that little communication blackout scare not long prior.

That said, getting over 14x the planned flights is simply amazing and more than we could have reasonably expected from the start.
Isgrimnur wrote: Thu Jan 25, 2024 6:59 pm They should just firewall the throttle and let it go out on its own terms.
A Viking Funeral on Mars does seem appropriate. Not likely to get a fire going there, though.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Hrdina wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2024 3:23 pm I'm actually sad about hearing this, especially since they just had that little communication blackout scare not long prior.

That said, getting over 14x the planned flights is simply amazing and more than we could have reasonably expected from the start.
Isgrimnur wrote: Thu Jan 25, 2024 6:59 pm They should just firewall the throttle and let it go out on its own terms.
A Viking Funeral on Mars does seem appropriate. Not likely to get a fire going there, though.
It will continue collecting and relaying data for as long as Percy has a line of sight. Once the rover goes over the crater rim, Ginny will be crippled and alone...but still alive, until her solar cells get covered in dust (unless NASA powers her down first).
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Re: Mars is hard

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I wonder if it's possible to use the rotors to blow some of the dust off.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Ingenuity was more revolutionary than we thought.
As cool as Ingenuity's flight log may be, the better story may be how the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory did it. Due to the aforementioned thin atmosphere, the team was constrained to a mass of just 4 pounds (less than 2 kg) for the entire helicopter. That is the equivalent of approximately five cans of Campbell's soup.

Those five cans of soup include your helicopter blades, which are several feet long, the batteries, the computer, the sensors and camera, the legs, the solar panel—all of it.

So, how did the team do it? They ditched traditional, space-rated hardware. They just couldn't take the mass penalty. For example, the RAD750 computer that operates most modern spacecraft—including the Perseverance rover—weighs more than 1 pound. They couldn't blow that much mass on the computer, even if it was designed specifically for spaceflight and was resistant to radiation.

Instead, Tzanetos said Ingenuity uses a 2015-era smartphone computer chip, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It has a mass of half an ounce.

The RAD750, introduced in 2001, is based on 1990s technology. The modern Qualcomm processor was designed for performance and has the benefit of 20 years of advancement in microprocessor technology. In addition to being orders of magnitudes cheaper—the RAD750 costs about a quarter of a million dollars, while the Qualcomm processor goes into inexpensive mobile phones—the newer chip has bucketloads of more performance.

"The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined," Tzanetos said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power that has flown on NASA's big missions beyond Earth orbit, from Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.

A similar philosophy went into other components, such as the rechargeable batteries on board. These are similar to the lithium batteries sold in power tools at hardware stores. Lithium hates temperature cycles, and on the surface of Mars, they would be put through a hellish cycle of temperatures from -130° Fahrenheit (-90° C) to 70° (20° C).

The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn't fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn't destroy the battery's storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.

"This is a massive victory for engineers," Tzanetos said.

Indeed it is. While NASA's most critical missions, where failure is not an option, will likely still use space-rated hardware, Ingenuity's success opens a new pathway for most science missions. They can be cheaper, lighter, and higher-performing in every way. This is almost unimaginably liberating for mission planners.
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Re: Mars is hard

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Excellent work
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Re: Mars is hard

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How NASA scientists worked to kill Ingenuity, and why they failed.
A few months before Aung agreed to take over management of the Mars helicopter project, NASA announced the seven "carefully selected" payloads that would accompany the Mars 2020 rover, as it was then known, down to the surface of the red planet. The payloads had been selected from among 58 proposals.

"The Mars 2020 rover, with these new advanced scientific instruments, including those from our international partners, holds the promise to unlock more mysteries of Mars’ past as revealed in the geological record," said John Grunsfeld, the leader of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, at the time.

The helicopter was not among the seven payloads. Why? Because it would not serve to advance the scientific research that was to be done on Mars. Principally, the rover would search for evidence of past life. To the scientists, a technology demonstration such as a helicopter was, at best, a nuisance. At worst, it could imperil the overall mission.

"The science community just wasn't interested in Ingenuity," said Bobby Braun, an aerospace engineer who worked on the Mars Pathfinder mission in the 1990s and who had a career in academia and government service.

Although the helicopter was not selected to fly on the Mars 2020 rover, Elachi wouldn't take no for an answer. He enlisted a trusted lieutenant at JPL, Jakob van Zyl, to shepherd the program. They found some internal funding to keep the project going. After Aung agreed to lead the technical aspects of the project, van Zyl set about taking care of the programmatic side of things.

He would take up the political fight to get the helicopter on the rover. Aung had to make it work.
A long and detailed account of how that went down follows.
Based upon the policy struggle to fly Ingenuity, there are lessons to be drawn for NASA managers and policymakers.

"I think it is critical to do crazy and innovative things as part of most missions," Zurbuchen said. "It is also critical to do it the right way. You have to make sure a tech demo doesn’t blossom into a disaster and jeopardize the prime mission. But it’s really important that leadership support these kinds of things."

Braun agreed that NASA should continue to innovate and try new ideas. It is incumbent on the agency to find opportunities to reinvent the future.

"For NASA, there is a really important lesson," he said. "We need to try new things. We need to break out of the status quo ways of doing business because not only is it possible to succeed in different ways, but when we do, there are so many benefits."

One striking thing is that almost all of the key people who made this mission happen are gone from their roles. Zurbuchen retired from NASA at the end of 2022 after spending nearly seven years leading the science directorate. Aung left NASA in 2021 to take a project management role at Amazon for its Project Kuiper satellite constellation. Elachi retired in 2016. Culberson lost a reelection bid in 2018. Braun left JPL in 2022 to lead space exploration at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Balaram just retired from NASA. Tragically, van Zyl died of a heart attack in August 2020. He never got to see Ingenuity fly on Mars.

So there was just this ephemeral moment in time when the right people, with the right idea, came together to make something truly remarkable happen. And then they went their separate ways. We are incredibly fortunate it happened at all.
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