Collaborate Disseminate
Among the most dangerous jobs in the United States are timberjack and aircraft pilot. Combining the two wouldn’t sound like a recipe for success, but in fact it makes the job of trimming trees near pipelines and power lines much safer. That’s what this helicopter-suspended chainsaw does. And it definitely …read more
Not so very long ago, orbital rockets simply didn’t get reused. After their propellants were expended on the journey to orbit, they petered out and fell back down into the ocean where they were obliterated on impact. Rockets were disposable because, as far as anyone could tell, building another one …read more
A newly-installed clean room webcam at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is giving members of the public a front row seat as technicians and engineers assemble the Mars 2020 rover. The robotic explorer will be accompanied by a helicopter equipped with a high-resolution camera when it launches to the Red Planet atop an Atlas V rocket next year.
..
Continue Reading 24-hour webcam let’s you watch as engineers build NASA’s next Mars rover
Category: Space
Tags:
Continue reading 24-hour webcam let's you watch as engineers build NASA's next Mars rover
It’s the first ever prosecution under UK drone laws for a flight that could have turned deadly, as did a recent helicopter disaster in Leicester. Continue reading Drone owner fined for putting police helicopter crew ‘in danger’
It’s the first ever prosecution under UK drone laws for a flight that could have turned deadly, as did a recent helicopter disaster in Leicester. Continue reading Drone owner fined for putting police helicopter crew ‘in danger’
Mountain goats in Olympic National Park are obsessed with human urine and are now a public nuisance. Continue reading A National Park Is Airlifting Hundreds of Mountain Goats That Have Gone Crazy for Human Pee
We’re not entirely sure what to call this one. It’s got the usual trappings of a drone, but with only a single rotor it clearly can’t be called by any of the standard multicopter names. Helicopter? Close, but not quite, since the rotor blades are fixed-pitch. We’ll just go with “monocopter” for now and sort out the details later for this ducted-fan, thrust-vectored UAV.
Whatever we choose to call it — builder [tesla500] dubbed it the simultaneously optimistic and fatalistic “Ikarus” — it’s really unique. The monocopter is built around a 90-mm electric ducted fan mounted vertically on a 3D-printed …read more
Continue reading Single-Rotor Drone: a Thrust-Vectoring Monocopter
The DIY aircraft crashed in Alberta, killing the pilot. Continue reading Canadian Man Dies in ‘Amateur-Built’ Helicopter Crash
While quadcopters seem to attract all the attention of the moment, spare some love for the rotary-wing aircraft that started it all: the helicopter. Quads may abstract away most of the aerodynamic problems faced by other rotorcraft systems through using software, but the helicopter has to solve those problems mechanically. And they are non-trivial problems, since the pitch of the rotors blades has to be controlled while the whole rotor disk is tilted relative to its axis.
The device that makes this possible is the swashplate, and its engineering is not for the faint of heart. And yet [MonkeyMonkeey] chose …read more
Continue reading Casting Tour-De-Force Results In Swashplate For Scale Helicopter
It’s time once again to see how those tax dollars are spent, this time in the form of a “Data Entry Keyboard” manufactured by Hughes Helicopters. This device was built circa 1986 or so, and was used in the AH-64A Apache. Specifically, this panel would have been located by the gunner’s left knee, and served as a general purpose input device for the Apache’s Fire Control System. Eventually the Apache was upgraded with a so-called “glass cockpit”; consolidating various vehicle functions into a handful of multi-purpose digital displays. As such, this particular device became obsolete and was pulled from the …read more
Continue reading Milspec Teardown: AH-64A Apache Data Entry Panel