Mechanical Butterflies?

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."

Comments

mars mission?

[n3k5]

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.