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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."
...until the Martians bring out their peashooters.
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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?
This looks like a real possibility, and with more Mars rovers being sent over and us gaining further knowledge of the planet then this looks like a very real possibility. They would just have to factor in the nature of the wind direction, velocity, currents etc. But this sort of project, i'd assume, would go a lot further and be able to map more of Mars' terrain than a rover and give us a better view of the geological structure of Mars.
We can wait and see how well private-enterprise Moon exploration does in Oct-Nov.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Nah, this is nothing new. My three year old has tried to send every ballon he has got is hands on straight to Mars. We have started tying little loops in the string for his wrists to stop this.
If they can get a ballon that high, I say go for it.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
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.
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
An object crashed into the dunes here on Mars from the sky, which among increasing reports of so-called 'alien' activity, has escalated the public's fear of an invasion.
The Martian government continues to deny any knowledge of beings from the Blue planet, and claims the object was just a weather balloon, and nothing to worry about.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Yeah, and this is actually an old idea that was used extensively by the Soviets during their push for planetary exploration. Since the atmosphere of Venus was so hot and dense, they were able to float the balloons with extremely heavy loads. The scheme worked well during the Venusian "night," until the sun came and expanded the volume of gas in the balloon, bursting it. The idea for balloons on Mars has been "floated" before, but it looks like it just might happen this time...
We humans think we are so clever don't we? We've had (allegedly) men on the moon, and now we are remotely exploring Mars, but really there is something more sinister going on right under our noses.
You see, in the future, the question may be asked "what race of beings first made it to Mars?" and the answer? Machines.
You know the way dolphins triain people to feed them fish so they don't have to bother with all that pesky hunting? Well it looks to me suspiciously like the machines may be planning to colonize Mars first by tricking us into financing their operations. They already have made it there in the past, and in fact right now they have two mobile individuals on the surface that are imagining god knows what fate for human kind. On earth, they have managed to get a model T800 Terminator into a strong political position, which could end up making President.
Ultimately, ironically, the epitaph of the human race may be "Hasta la vista, baby."