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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!
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.
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.