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Flying on Mars
jimharris submitted a bunch of links about flying on Mars: "X-Plane's author Austin Meyer is working out the details of flying on Mars. Meyer has taken his system and adapted it for the conditions on Mars and has discovered a lot about what it would take to fly on Mars, where the atmospheric pressure is 1 percent of Earth, and gravity one third, but laws of flight remain the same. Flying becomes difficult, and landing almost impossible. Other people are working with NASA to create Entomopters engineered to meet Mars conditions. More ideas about the concept can be found at PBS's Scientific American Frontiers. A quick search at Google will reveal many people are thinking about flying on Mars." It's a beautiful challenge - how to fly in a situation where everything you "know" about flight is wrong.
Did you even read the article?
The laws of physics are the laws of physics -- and they're the same on Mars. Yes, you'll need larger wings, and will have to fly *much* faster than you would here -- but 1) we can easily calculate all these factors (like Austin did) and 2) we've already got planes here on Earth that fly in somewhat similar conditions (up at 100k feet -- not 1/3rd Earth gravity, but the same weak atmosphere (well, it's not mostly CO2, but there are realms where the Reynold's numbers are the same.)
The only way that `everything we know about flight' could be wrong is if `everything we know about flight' corresponds to `Give it full power, wait a few seconds as it accelerates, and then pull back on the stick at 60 knots, and your Cub will take off'. Sorry, but we do know more than this. If we didn't, this article wouldn't even be here.
Other /. posters have commented about the horrible `storms' on Mars. I'm not so sure they'd be a problem for anything but a blimp -- sure, the wind may be blowing at 200 knots -- but that's only 1/3rd of your cruising speed (and only 20 knots on your Earth-calibrated air speed indicator -- it wouldn't even faze a guy in a spacesuit walking on the surface.) Hell, a 400 knot headwind might allow you to take off and land in a reasonably short space :)
What would be even neater than flying in Mars would be flying in Venus or Jupiter. As I understand it, Venus has a thicker atmosphere, so you could fly slower and turn quicker. Jupiter is a gas giant, so as you get deeper and deeper the atmosphere would get thicker and thicker -- of course, the pressure goes up too, and since it's mostly hydrogen, you're likely to have a much higher pressure than you'd find on Earth before the atmosphere would be as `thick' as it is here, but it would certainly be doable.