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upstart writes:

Motorless sailplane for exploring Mars soars like albatross:

The huge success of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity has proven it's possible to explore other planets from the air, and researchers are working on a variety of flying craft concepts for future planetary missions. To fill in our knowledge of Mars between rovers on the surface and orbiters in space, researchers from the University of Arizona have proposed an experimental sailplane that operates without a motor and that could sail through the Martian air for days at a time.

"You have this really important, critical piece in this planetary boundary layer, like in the first few kilometers above the ground," said Alexandre Kling, a research scientist in NASA's Mars Climate Modeling Center, in a statement. "This is where all the exchanges between the surface and atmosphere happen. This is where the dust is picked up and sent into the atmosphere, where trace gases are mixed, where the modulation of large-scale winds by mountain-valley flows happen. And we just don't have very much data about it."

The idea is to fill this gap with a wind-powered sailplane that could glide through the air when there is enough wind, and also use a technique called dynamic soaring when the vertical wind isn't strong enough to keep it in the air. Similar to the way birds like albatrosses can soar on extremely long journeys, the technique takes advantage of the way higher altitudes tend to have stronger winds, allowing a craft to continue flying by changing both direction and altitude as required.

A big problem I see is that once it lands, it can't get back up into the sky.

Journal Reference:
by Adrien Bouskela, Alexandre Kling, Tristan Schuler, et al., Mars Exploration Using Sailplanes, Aerospace 2022, 9(6), 306; DOI: 10.3390/aerospace9060306

[Ed's Comment: AC Friendly withdrawn. You can blame you-know-who for the spamming]

Original Submission