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Tiny Glider Could Cruise Through Martian Skies
A tiny aircraft could be plying Mars' skies less than a decade from now.
NASA researchers are developing a glider, called Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars (Prandtl-m), for possible inclusion on a Mars rover mission in the 2022-2024 time frame.
An acronym that only NASA could love!
Could a Glider Hitch a Ride On Mars Rover Missions?
IEEE Spectrum has a report on an interesting proposal to exploit ballast mass in a Mars Rover mission to deploy a cubesat containing a micro glider
To ensure a safe landing on Mars, a rover inside an aeroshell has to haul along a bunch of ballast to help it orient itself before and after atmospheric entry. This ballast gets jettisoned at two different points in order to control the aeroshell's center of gravity and attitude, so it's very important to have along. But, it's also useless, in that hundreds of kilograms of mass that you've hauled all the way from the surface of Earth out to Mars just gets dumped.
NASA, knowing better than anyone how difficult and expensive it is to send stuff to Mars, has been soliciting ideas on how to do something useful with this balance mass. One brilliant idea that's taken flight: an airplane.
...
Prandtl-m would be a small, foldable carbon fiber aircraft that could fit into the volume of a 3U Cubesat—roughly three 10-centimeter cubes stuck together. Deployed, the aircraft would have a 60-centimeter wingspan, and would weigh about half a kilogram. There'd be no engine: the Cubesat unit would be ejected from the aeroshell, survive the atmospheric entry, and then deploy the glider a few thousand feet above the surface of Mars. The glider would soar for about 10 minutes (giving it a range of about 30 kilometers), and then it would, uh, make aggressive contact with the ground.
The original Mars Ballast Challenge and Glider Page have additional details.
Original Submission #1 and Original Submission #2
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 03 2015, @03:41AM
What for? The dead weight is anyway doomed to crashland.
Again... because?
(until anyone to eat it arrives, it would decay anyway: freeze/thaw cycles - Mars temperature can get to 20C [space.com] - radiation, impact on landing...)
Ah... but they can build those gliders from biodegradable materials, no?
(large grin) [soylentnews.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday July 03 2015, @04:55AM
Dead weight need not crash land. Unless you plan it that way. http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/spacecraft_edl_airbags.html [nasa.gov]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 03 2015, @05:23AM
Then, it's not dead weight - those airbags need to be deployed at a good moment, so there need to be some "alive intelligence" in that weight (after all, this is what TFA is about)
(did you miss my final -large grin- linking to an excellent explanation an AC provided? My apologies for wasting your time, I was building towards the "biodegradable materials for the plane" stupidity)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford