<story><title>NASA loses contact with Ingenuity Mars helicopter</title><url>https://www.space.com/nasa-loses-contact-ingenuity-mars-helicopter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roughly</author><text>NASA’s got a history of their rovers overperforming like this. Between this and Webb, it’s hard to argue they’re not the best out there.</text></item><item><author>tedivm</author><text>This is pretty sad but also pretty amazing. The original plan was for five flights of around 90 seconds each, and it looks like it finally failed on flight 72 with a total from all flights of two hours, eight minutes and eighteen seconds of flight time. All of this in an extremely thin atmosphere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasonpeacock</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s less about being the best (no criticism of NASA) but rather engineering decisions to _guarantee_ the planned mission, which means you over-engineer and thus get extra performance&amp;#x2F;reliability. You&amp;#x27;re not willing to accept the statistical risk that may end a mission early.</text></comment>
<story><title>NASA loses contact with Ingenuity Mars helicopter</title><url>https://www.space.com/nasa-loses-contact-ingenuity-mars-helicopter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roughly</author><text>NASA’s got a history of their rovers overperforming like this. Between this and Webb, it’s hard to argue they’re not the best out there.</text></item><item><author>tedivm</author><text>This is pretty sad but also pretty amazing. The original plan was for five flights of around 90 seconds each, and it looks like it finally failed on flight 72 with a total from all flights of two hours, eight minutes and eighteen seconds of flight time. All of this in an extremely thin atmosphere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>giantrobot</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not overperforming per se. NASA spacecraft&amp;#x2F;probes have primary, secondary, and auxiliary missions. Everything on the probe is designed and built with an eye to being able to complete secondary and auxiliary missions but the guarantee (insofar as anything can be) is the probe can accomplish its primary mission.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this leads to uninformed reporters to make stupid claims like &amp;quot;a probe only designed to last 90 days...&amp;quot;. There&amp;#x27;s no self destruct or planned obsolescence in NASA probes. They don&amp;#x27;t have an egg timer set to 90 days and then explode.&lt;p&gt;The probes are &lt;i&gt;designed&lt;/i&gt; to last at least as long as the ability for their consumables&amp;#x2F;power supply lasts. Consider the stresses of launch, transit through space, and insertion&amp;#x2F;landing are way worse than day to day conditions for a lot of probes. If they can survive all of that rolling around a desert is relatively easy (in comparison). If Ingenuity made one successful flight there was little reason it couldn&amp;#x27;t make more so long as it had the appropriate power available and the Martian Space Defense didn&amp;#x27;t shoot it down.&lt;p&gt;Ingenuity didn&amp;#x27;t overperform, it performed according to its actual design and construction. It only overperformed misinformed media expectations.</text></comment>