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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.
We have large lifting craft that require almost no runway for takeoff and landing.. they are they relatives to the blimp.
Same laws apply.. sure there is less of an atmosphere.. but you also have one third the gravity to contend with. The main problem with such craft on the martian surface would be the fact that 1) they are huge, and 2) they are light. With the storms that have been witnessed on mars recently, storing such a craft would be a nightmare if you didn't collapse it and store it. Lets not forget the possibility you COULD be in the air when such a storm kicks up.. nothing could save your arse if that happened..
I think this will be the way we go.. because a dirigible could be packed into a small payload area for transport to the martian surface. The added bonus is that Mars has VERY little oxygen in the atmosphere.. so it becomes safe to fill the dirigible with hydrogen as opposed to helium, giving you much more lifting power.. the problem comes with storing compress hydrogen when you deflate these behemoths.. wouldn't want to store the tanks near an oxygen rich environment like say.. in the living structures or greenhouses.. =)
. echo -e \\04 >
Same laws apply.. sure there is less of an atmosphere.. but you also have one third the gravity to contend with. The main problem with such craft on the martian surface would be the fact that 1) they are huge, and 2) they are light. With the storms that have been witnessed on mars recently, storing such a craft would be a nightmare if you didn't collapse it and store it. Lets not forget the possibility you COULD be in the air when such a storm kicks up.. nothing could save your arse if that happened..
.38g gravity of of Mars really helps - landing vertically should be a cinch.
Fortunately, the laws of rocketry also continue to apply. The
As for structural lightness, remember, the air is very thin. What looks like a huge storm on a satellite photo just isn't going to going to blow anything over on the ground. It's true, Martian winds can pick up small particles, and researchers are still trying to figure out how that happens - vortices maybe, and the oarger particles probably don't get very far off the ground. Global dust storms would contain only the finest particles.
Blimps/dirigibles on the other hand... with less than 1% atmosphere, you have less than 1% of the bouyancy. In the end your balloon will have to be 30 times bigger to lift the same mass. This means that, while a balloon might work, a dirigible won't. Too much structure required.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
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...
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
I was able to find a few images of mars, this one here is particularly good. In terms of color it seems fairly ok to me, though the other color references are a bit limited. Also, a basic overview of Raleigh Scatter for those who are interested can be found at www.people.cornell.edu/pages/eac26/RaleighScatteri ng.html. A quick quote from it, Have you ever seen a brilliant red sunset? After all of the colors have scattered out of the white light, we see the oranges and reds. Where on the horizon are the red colors found? The reds are found close to the horizon because the sunlight must pass through many particles before we reach the point that red is scattered out. So if the atmosphere of Mars is particularly dusty for instance then you'd get a more red hue (at least if I'm reading this right), making the Mars sky closer in hue to a reddish color.
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