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Mechanical Butterflies?

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the travelin-arrakis-style dept.

MImeKillEr writes "According to an article on BBC News, two researchers from Oxford took highspeed photographs of an Admiral butterfly in a specially-designed windtunnel to study how butterflies fly. The resulting research brings insight into small-scale flight dynamics. Although the article doesn't give an ETA on this, they expect to be able to build an aircraft with a 10cm wingspan that will be either autonomous or radio controlled. This will allow them to be used in rescue missions, cave exploration and possibly even on Mars."

5 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hard to fly on mars.. by buswolley · · Score: 3, Informative
    Mars has an atmosphere, albeit a thin one made mostly of carbondioxide. it may be but a whisper of a wind, but MArs has giant dust storms all the time.

    .Got to get facts straightened out.

    on a side note. Lets attack Mars.

    --

    A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.

  2. mars mission? by n3k5 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In the atmosphere of Mars, the are only 1.5% the molecules we have. The composition is also evry different, but the point is: it's _very_ thin. OTOH, the gravity on Mars is about 38% of Earth's gravity.

    So if you have something that flies on Earth, it's still a long way to go until you get it to fly on Mars.

    --
    but what do i know, i'm just a model.
    1. Re:mars mission? by Xerithane · · Score: 3, Informative

      Plus, just scaling the wings won't work. Any serious increase in the size of the wings will require you to increase the size of the motor, solenoid, dielectric fiber, or whatever is moving the wing.

      In an unnamed project, we had the task of building a simulator (99.9% accurate, my what fun) for flight on mars. After building the system, when the plane reached 180 knots it would begin an oscillation pattern that would eventually drive it into the ground.

      We got some aerospace engineers to take a look at the problem, and they started laughing and said that was normal because we were breaking the speed of sound at that altitude/speed.

      Flying on mars is much different than flying on earth for a lot of things you wouldn't directly think about. But you are right, scaling wings wouldn't do anything right there. The best way to make a plane to fly on Mars is to look into glider dynamics.

      --
      Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
  3. smallest rc airplane by ch-chuck · · Score: 3, Informative

    that I know of is this guy, the L'il Skeeter.

    --
    try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
  4. In caves? Hardly. by mtngrown · · Score: 3, Informative

    RC in caves is a ludicrous concept, save for line of sight, but then, why bother. Cave radios work with really looooowwwwww frequencies and require rather large coil antennas to transmit through all that rock. Cave radios are pretty finicky too. This is why cave rescue organizations (good ones) have the ability to lay a mile or two of phone wire in really horrible conditions.

    RC butterflies or RC anything-else just ain't gonna happen in a cave.