Fly Over Mars... in a Robotic Balloon

Roland Piquepaille writes "A Californian company, Global Aerospace Corporation (GAR), is developing remote-controlled balloons for the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). BBC News Online reports that their goal is to send these balloons carrying robots and cameras to explore Mars skies. But it's not for a near term future. The robotic StratoSail will have a stabilizing wing suspended several miles below it. It will be able to stay above Mars for months. It will send robotic probes to monitor the surface and minilabs to carry out experiments. This overview contains more details, references and images about the StratoSail."

Comments

Dependence on atmospheric pressure

[DirtyJ]

I would think that the success of this would depend on our knowledge of the density of the Martian atmosphere. Do we know much about this? Since the pressure will decline with increased altitude, I guess even imperfect knowledge of the absolute pressure could still result in a successful mission, as the balloon would just sink or rise to an altitude of equilibrium. If so, then the balloon could end up with a different field of view than designed. Anyone out there with better knowledge of such atmospheric issues?

Re:good link i was reading

[Siergen]

Hmm, so the wing has to be lowered to an altitude with different winds (direction and/or speed) in order to allow the balloon to "tack" into the wind like an inverted sail boat. That's a neat idea! I can easily understand how that would work here on Earth.

However, I was under the impression that the less dense Martian atmosphere changed little with altitude. Is there enough variation in Martian winds with altitude for this system to work there?

Re:New Mars Innovations

[AndroidCat]

We can wait and see how well private-enterprise Moon exploration does in Oct-Nov.

Use as a Wi-Fi / Broadcasting Point

[Gurezaemon]

Am I the only one that thinks this could be a useful way to keep stable a base from which to broadcast all sorts of stuff?

Tethered balloons have long annoying (and heavy?) tethers for planes to run into, but this seems to stay above that height.

Covering the gas bag with solar cells or the like could mean the thing could stay up there for ages.

Pie in the sky

[StickMang]

This is funny because I work for NASA's Balloon Program Office, and I think this was an idea that we rejected. From what I remember, the relationship between Global Aerospace and the BPO went sour, so I assume that after we rejected their proposal on this, they went around trying to sell it to different parts of NASA.

We're developing our own balloon trajectory control system that hasn't been publicised yet, and it will be what flies on mars and earth, not this pile of garbage from GAC. I beleive the model they showed us was flawed in many ways, so we decided we could design it better in-house. Not really sure why there's an article on this, but you might as well not worry about any advancements on this particular project, as it will never materialize.

Re:Pie in the sky

[davejenkins]

We're developing our own balloon trajectory control system that hasn't been publicised yet, and it will be what flies on mars and earth, not this pile of garbage from GAC. I beleive the model they showed us was flawed in many ways, so we decided we could design it better in-house. Not really sure why there's an article on this, but you might as well not worry about any advancements on this particular project, as it will never materialize

Hrmmmm... I am not sure which is worse:

1. the inferred arrogance of this post (and assumingly in that office and NASA in general)
2. the theiving of intellectual property (you will most likely use some of their ideas somewhere)
3. the declatory statements that your office has a monopoly on things.

Aren`t any ofthe rants getting through to you guys at NASA? When will you simply focus on supporting destinations and building simple platforms, through which the rest of us can then launch/explore/build what we want? (yes, we will pay you the fees...)

What about the pending helium shortage?

[slashname3]

Now we are going to ship helium to Mars? What happened to the helium shortage that was mentioned a couple of years ago?
I seem to remember reading that the worlds reserves (which I believe are mostly if not all in the U.S.) are getting down to almost critical levels with no new reserves being found.

Re:What about the pending helium shortage?

[tho 1234]

YOu might want to work out the math behind your idea first. As you may know, the electric force decreases with the SQUARE of the distance, so any the electric force you can produce in a balloon of macroscopic proportions is going to be negligible. Certainly not enough to counteract the 15 pounds of force acting on every square inch of the balloon.

And you can't increase the voltage past a few thousand volts, that would simply ionize the air and cause arcing.

Even if you could supply enough voltage, the control system would be impossible to achieve, as any turbulance in the air will change the shape in certain areas of the balloon, requiring massive real-time corrections to the voltage for it to maintain its shape. This is would require solving in real time millions of simultaneous non-linear equations, something we're not about to achieve.

Good and bad

[Gorimek]

Good: This avoids the by far most dangerous part of current Mars missions: The landing. Since the balloon doesn't have to hit the ground, it won't break when it hits the ground.

Bad: Mars' atmosphere is about 0.5% of our. In other words, it's 99.5% vacuum. How ginormogantuan must a balloon be to carry any serious weight there?? Gravity is just 1/3, but that hardly begins to compensate.

Atmoshperic Density

[Rank_Tyro]

It's my understanding that the Martian atmoshpere is a lot thinner than ours. How much helium would be needed to support several hundred pounds of equipment? Wouldn't hydrogen be a better gas?