Lifeboat Foundation

NASA has delayed the first flight of its Ingenuity Mars helicopter after a crucial test-spin of the drone’s rotor blades abruptly stopped.

This was the last major test to make sure the helicopter would be ready for its first flight, which was originally scheduled for early Monday. Now NASA has delayed the historic liftoff — which would mark the first powered, controlled flight on another planet — to Wednesday.

For the test on Friday, Ingenuity was supposed to spin its blades at full speed while on the ground. The two pairs of blades should have spun in opposite directions at more than 2500 rotations per minute — about eight times faster than an Earth helicopter. On flight day, they’ll need that speed to lift the 4-pound drone into the thin Martian atmosphere. That air has just 1% the density of Earth’s atmosphere, making Ingenuity’s task the equivalent of flying three times higher than the peak of Mount Everest.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stage landed on the “Of Course I Still Love You” drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean on April 7, 2021 shortly after launching 60 Starlink satellites. It was the “79th recovery of a orbital-class rocket,” according to SpaceX. See the rocket launch: https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-23-satellite-mission-launch-rocket-landing.

Credit: SpaceX

Are you ready for a little Ingenuity?

NASA will this week make its first attempt at powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.

Continue reading “Mars Helicopter: How To Follow Online This Week As NASA’s $80 Million ‘Ingenuity’ Drone Attempts A Unique Flight” »

Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest electronics wholesale market area in the Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen, has become the latest Wonderland for geeks, the way Tokyo’s Akihabara was to otaku during the tech bubble at the turn of the millennium. Amid the warren of closet-sized shops and makeshift stalls, the latest catalogue of smartphones, LED lights, holograms, electronic parts and every type of gadget imaginable compete for attention and the spending yuan of consumers.

Shenzhen has become an international hotspot for the unmanned aerial vehicle industry, following the global success of drone giant DJI.

The recent eruptions in Iceland, vividly captured through dramatic drone footage, have drawn public attention to the immense power of volcanoes. Beautiful though they are, and mesmerizing to watch, they are also deadly.

History has recorded eruptions so spectacular they’ve never been forgotten. These include Krakatoa in 1883, whose explosion was heard around the world and Mount Tambora, which resulted in famines across the northern hemisphere.

Continue reading “Pompeii: Ancient remains are helping scientists learn what happens to a body caught in a volcanic eruption” »

We wrote about DroneUp’s drone delivery of Coke with Coffee to residents in Coffee, GA – but how exactly did that delivery work? The A2Z Rapid Delivery System allowed packages to be delivered without landing the drone – a method that solves a lot of problems in drone delivery.

CA-based A2Z Drone Delivery, LLC, has developed a patented tethered freefall drone delivery mechanism, the Rapid Delivery System (RDS1) used by DroneUp® for the project with Walmart and Coke. The RDS1 system lowers the delivery to the ground by tether – which means that homeowners don’t have to worry about a noisy landing or the potential for a landing drone to hit obstacles on its way down. “The RDS1 was chosen for its rapid delivery capabilities which reduced time-on-station to just 30 seconds per delivery, while minimizing intrusive rotor noise and limiting the window for risk to people on the ground,” says an A2Z press release.

“For our partners at DroneUp to put their trust in our system was the best proof of concept that we could imagine and was a memorable benchmark for our whole team,” said Aaron Zhang, founder of A2Z Drone Delivery, LLC. “The unique capabilities of the RDS1 were tailor-made for this type of residential delivery where our tethered freefall mechanism can accurately and quickly deposit payloads while hovering far from people, homes, trees and utility wires.”

It may sound like the result of a crossbreed between Amazon Prime and HBO Max, but this thing here is not a streaming service. It is, in fact, an imagined vehicle destined to help the online giant better handle the massive, headache-causing part of its business that is called delivery.

Satellite delivery isn’t exactly cutting-edge tech these days. Lately it feels like SpaceX is doing that every week. Liftoff usually starts with a ground-based rocket, which is expensive and time-consuming to launch. Aevum believes its massive Ravn X drone can do it better, for less money.

At 80 feet long and 18 feet tall, the Ravn X is the world’s biggest drone, says Aevum. Driven by Aevum’s proprietary software, the drone would fly itself to a specified altitude, where it would launch a rocket to deliver a payload of small satellites to low Earth orbit. Click the video above for more on the delivery process.

The launch system is 70% reusable, Aevum said. CEO Jay Skylus hopes to get that close to 100%.

A helicopter for Mars. 😃

The Ingenuity helicopter could pioneer a new way to explore space. In the future, drones may do reconnaissance for Mars astronauts and rovers.