Happy Friday! Here’s your daily tech digest, by way of the DGiT Daily newsletter, for Friday, March 29, 2019!
1. NASA’s Mars Helicopter takes flight
NASA has an answer for everything it seems, including this puzzle: how do you fly a helicopter on Mars, where the Martian atmosphere is about one percent as dense as Earth, and may be as cold as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius)?
- The solution, it seems, is to keep your helicopter light.
- NASA’s helicopter uses more than “1500 individual pieces of carbon fiber, flight-grade aluminum, silicon, copper, foil and foam,” weighing no more than 4 pounds (1.8kg).
- And you spin carbon fibre blades as fast as you can!
Testing that theory:
- Testing in like-for-like conditions involved either ascending to 100,000 feet, or adapting the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Space Simulator in Pasadena, California.
- The JPL chamber was first cleared by vacuum of all air, with a tiny amount of carbon dioxide added to simulate the Martian environment.
- Then, a ‘gravity offload’ system was cooked up to simulate Mars’ reduced gravity, which is about 38% of earth.
- The whole test was recorded and uploaded to Vimeo, and, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, it took off!
- NASA only wanted to see it rise two inches, and that it did.
- “We only required a 2-inch (5-centimeter) hover to obtain all the data sets needed to confirm that our Mars helicopter flies autonomously as designed in a thin Mars-like atmosphere; there was no need to go higher,” said Teddy Tzanetos, test conductor for the Mars Helicopter at JPL, in a JPL press release.
- “It was a heck of a first flight.”
- Should all continue to go to plan, the helicopter arrives on Mars in February 2021, as part of the Mars 2020 rover.
- “The next time we fly, we fly on Mars,” project manager MiMi Aung said.
- “Watching our helicopter go through its paces in the chamber, I couldn’t help but think about the historic vehicles that have been in there in the past. The chamber hosted missions from the Ranger Moon probes to the Voyagers to Cassini, and every Mars rover ever flown. To see our helicopter in there reminded me we are on our way to making a little chunk of space history as well.”
Bonus: If you’re a German speaker, NASA wants to pay you to stay in bed for two months (Insider)
2. How Apple Card works (and why zero cashback means it’s pointless on Android) (TechCrunch)
3. Huawei P30 Pro vs Huawei P20 Pro: “The best gets better” (AA)
4. What is Nano Memory and where is it headed? (AA)
5. Samsung Galaxy S10+ takes top spot in Consumer Reports’ smartphone ratings. CR now considers reliability and satisfaction across the brand (CR)
6. Google Photos will start to offer single-tap autocropped photos as soon as this week on Android (Twitter)
7. FCC “fined” robocallers $208 million since 2015 but collected only $6,790 because it has no authority (Ars Technica)
8. Emails between 20 Facebook and Instagram execs have surfaced showing Facebook’s handling of Alex Jones is a microcosm of its content policy problem (TechCrunch).
9. AI is very good at predicting who will die prematurely (LiveScience).
10. San Franciscans raise $46,000 to stop homeless shelter in wealthy area, others start a supporting GoFundMe, then GoFundMe itself funds the effort supporting the homeless (The Guardian).
11. Twitch Prime now comes with a free year of Nintendo Switch Online service (The Verge). (This means you can now play the Tetris 99 battle royale game. Which I have won. Just saying.)
12. Garfield phones beach mystery finally solved after 35 years (BBC).
13. What’s the least useful body part? (Gizmodo). Genuinely fascinating.
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