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.

Comments

Re:Idea!

[The Gardener]

Helicopters aren't fuel efficient, nor are their rotor "wings" good for lifting in a one percent atmosphere. A plane like the U-2 would be the obvious choice, except for the horrendous storms on Mars.

The Gardener

Using jet engines to slow down in thin atmosphere

[BlowCat]

From the article:

Reverse thrust? NOPE!!!! With only 1% atmosphere, jet or prop engines can put out basically no thrust...

I was surprised that Austin Meyer doesn't understand that the thrust of jet engines in either direction doesn't depend on the atmosphere density, unlike prop engines. Am I missing something?

Re:In response to others...

[jackal!]

I hope this doesn't sound like a flame (famous last words!)

I've seen no good proof to believe the sky is red, if its because the ground is red, think about the earth, in the middle of a desert, or forest, is the sky yellow or green? looking at that, you'll often think they'll be bluer than at the beach (where it tends to look grey, I live at a beach town).

Go to a desert during a dust storm. The sky WILL be brown/sand coloured. That's part of the idea behind the red Martian sky: high amounts of red/orange/yellow dust in the atmosphere because of those storms that are always happening somewhere on the planet.

Because the colour of the sky is caused by Raleigh scattering (or other scattering effects), the effect (based on the size distribution of particles in the atmosphere) is the same on Mars as it is Earth.

The same on Mars as it is on Earth? If the colour of the sky is dependent of the atmosphere and its contents, then the Earth and Martian skies should be completely different, just as the atmospheres are.

Somewhere, if you hunt around for photos from the surface of mars, and correct using say, photoshop, for the colour (look at the parts of the probe you can see in the picture and return them to their original colours, usually white or metal, unless its an american flag), the sky will be blue.

I don't even know where to begin with this one. It's as if O.J. Simpson took pictures of his poor victims, and photoshopped away stab wounds to prove that they aren't in fact dead. Sure you can prove that the Martian sky is blue with one Photoshop filter, and I can prove that I'm 50 pounds thinner with another...