Wednesday, April 21, 2021

racist math makes a drone fly on Mars

Math has been declared racist by the loony left.  Good luck as leftist engineers try to build non-racist buildings, ships, cars, rockets, and bridges that never collapse or crash.  In the meantime, in the sane world, people are cheering the first-ever flight of Ingenuity, nicknamed "Ginny," the little drone helicopter that was stored inside Perseverance,  the Mars rover designed by the JPL to be the successor to that amazing workhorse, Curiosity.

Dr. Becky's infectious reaction (Rebecca Smethurst is a British, Oxford-based astrophysicist and an unfailingly cheerful YouTube personality) can be seen here; NASA has the footage, taken from Perseverance, of Ginny's maiden flight here.  It's a small, simple thing—fly three meters straight up, hover, then descend straight down and land safely—but it's the first time powered flight has occurred in all of Mars' ancient history.  Keep in mind, as Dr. Becky notes, that the Martian atmosphere has only 1% the density of Earth's; this means the rotors on Ginny have to rotate at an incredibly high RPM—about 2500 rpm, I think Becky says.

This is a massive achievement, and it's almost enough to make me forget how crappy we human beings are here on Earth.  I wonder where we go from here.



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