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Robert Zubrin's Mars Gashopper Airplane
Fraser Cain writes "Universe Today has a story about Robert Zubrin's (Mars Society President) Martian Gashopper Aircraft proposal to NASA. It uses solar power to liquefy carbon dioxide and then use it as a propellant to take off, fly hundreds of km above the surface of Mars like an airplane, and then land vertically again."
You're correct in one aspect, that it can only examine a small area at a time. However, with this new vehicle, they aren't limited to one geographical feature set. With the rovers, we are limited to flat terrain that is navigable by wheeled autonomic vehicles. With this, we can fly down to the bottom of a chasm and take readings down there, where there may be a better chance to find some sign of life (ie an area of Mars that is more well preserved than others).
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
This thing could hop around and get a broader view of the planet, compared to the rovers which move what, a meter or two a day?
The terrain might be completely different 100km or so away, but the dirt thats 10 feet from here is probably exactly the same as the dirt you're currently on.
This thing would no doubt have more luck stumbling upon a deposit of water ice or finding bacteria or something of the sort.
The article talks about this being a good way to blast off if you wanted to make a return trip back to earth, which would be good for a potential manned mission, since you'd cut your fuel requirement nearly in half.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Hope you managed to get your knee out from under your desk before it jerked. Patellar cartilage takes a long time to heal.
You need to learn a little about how RTGs work and how ridiculously clean and safe they actually are.
Gee, that says a lot about humanities approach to global issues: "It won't affect us, so why not?" Not only are we ruining our OWN planet, but now we're going to ruin another one?
How will this hurt the planet? All they are doing is using solar energy to compress CO2 into liquid form, then heating it back up again to make it rapidly expand back into gas form, giving thrust. This is no different then compressing a bunch of air here on earth and then spraying it back out again. I dont see how this could possibly hurt the enviroment.
This will allow us to get a more general picture of specific areas of the planet Mars, rather than the ant-like views that we get from the rovers; that's not to say they aren't important. They are, because they give us very specific information.
It'll be really nice to see this project eventually realized. My question is, how durable can something like the gashopper be? What if it landed funny and broke something?
The global warming people indicate that carbon dioxide is a major problem and is coming from factories and the like. Could they not cap off the factory chimnies or whatever (I honestly don't know) and at least try to do something useful with it?
I think their concern is that hydrocarbons in the soil will make it difficult to work out what the soil is really made of.
Radioactive metals in the RTG can't confuse chemical analysis, even if they are released during the landing
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The advantage this concept has is one of sampling scales. We know very little about Mars in terms of its global minerology, etc. I'd say "geography" and "geology" except some pendant would insist that the correct term is "areology" or "gnu/areology" or something.
In any case, landing in one or two spots tells us about those spots, but we'd really like to know about over overall structure of the planet. On Earth, for example, we have big structures like the Canadian Shield. Landing on one spot and then moving around will tell you that, yep, you got granite over here, too. What we'd like to do is sample on a coarse scale, so we could see that a few 100 km away we've got completely different geology.
That's where the gashopper comes in. It's an extremely clever concept. The Martian atmosphere is mostly CO2, and the cycle of boost, glide, land and recharge could go on for a long time. It's a great way to explore a new planet on a scale that's never been done before.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The gashopper is 1/3 the weight of the rover. Why is it that they start talking about adding more features, like mini-rovers, to fill in the extra weight? They should just send 3 of them. It will take 30 days for each of them to recharge for flight but you could just offset the take off times by 10 days each. You would have 10 days to study each small area. Or maybe you would stay with one of them that is in an interesting area and only spend a few hours on another. Or split up the group into 3 teams. Whatever. It beats waiting around for the next flight and if one of them crashes into a mountain or something you still have 2 more to work with.
The atmosphere of Mars is very thin. Anything involving a propeller or fan is going to be nearly useless.
If it was anyone else but Zubrin, I might think the idea had merit. Unfortunately, the more ideas I read from this guy, the more convinced I am that he's a nut case. Take a look at this article: http://space.com/news/aps_report_041123.html Zubrin's comments are down at the bottom. In this case, he's insisting that the Hubble Space Telescope was only made possible thanks to the space shuttle (Zubrin is a space shuttle fan - that ought to tell you something). In fact, Hubble was launched on the space shuttle only because NASA was desperately looking for a way to justify the cost of the space shuttle - it would have been much cheaper to send up Hubble on an unmanned rocket. And Hubble was deliberately designed so that it would need constant servicing by the space shuttle, again to justify the space shuttle (and now that the shuttle is grounded, Hubble is falling apart). Zubrin has an agenda. His agenda is not to support good space science, his agenda is to promote Buck Rogers gee-whiz "technology".
I wonder if it would be possible for larger versions of these to ferry rovers to various locations on the surface. The rover could roam around while the 'hopper compresses. When all is said and done the two dock with each other and set sail for another spot to explore.