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September 5, 2021 Archives
Sunday, September 5, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Completes 13th Flight
Happy Flight the 13th!🚁
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) September 5, 2021
Ingenuity has achieved its 13th successful flight on Mars. It traveled at 7.3 mph (3.3 m/s) taking images pointing southwest of the South Seítah region. This aerial scouting continues to aid in planning @NASAPersevere’s next moves. https://t.co/tboEcnLvx3 pic.twitter.com/QIp8QSVxbq
Ingenuity has now been operating on Mars for 141 sols (Martian days), far beyond its planned 30 day technology demonstration mission. It is now being used to scout destinations and routes for the Perseverance rover, which deployed it on 2021-04-03. Here is a pre-flight summary of the plan for flight 13.
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Single Event Upsets—Computer Crashes from Deep Space
Note that while error correction code (ECC) memory can dramatically reduce the vulnerability of computer systems to errors induced by cosmic rays or other exogenous sources (memory arrays are very dense and have few electrons per storage cell, and thus present both a large and soft target), the logic circuits within processors and other electronics remain at risk and, except for special-purpose and very expensive “radiation hardened” or multiple redundant hardware designed for aerospace applications, are not protected against upsets.
Single event upsets due to cosmic rays do not damage electronics: they just cause transient errors where the computer does something it isn't supposed to. This makes it extremely difficult to diagnose the source of the problem, and when something apparently inexplicable happens due to poorly designed and incompetently implemented software (for example, that intermittently operating system famed for its “blue screen of death”), its sloppy perpetrators sometimes blame it instead on “a cosmic ray”. It does happen, but usually it's crappy code.
CONTINUITY: Colour-Motion Optical Illusion
New version of a color-motion illusion by @jagarikin
— World of Engineering (@engineers_feed) September 4, 2021
pic.twitter.com/GRh9yFlLhG