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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."
Is it possible to use this technology here on Earth? We certainly have the carbon dioxide for the fuel. Are higher temperatures or gravitational forces a showstopper?
While the mobility is an interesting concept (being able to move 100+ km at once), how does this change the vehicle's ability to analyze more area? The other crafts "can only examine a few square metres of ground"... at a time. But then it moves and does it again... The only differences I see is that the gashopper does it's analysis of the "few square metres of ground" then hops ~100km away only to analyze a "few square metres of ground." How is this spotty analysis better than continuous examination? Maybe it could be used in conjunction with other crafts of old style. The gashopper gets sent to interesting locations to determine if they should send a more traditional land-based craft? One thing is does have going for it is the ability to refuel itself.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
I love that diagram on the website. Future press conference transcript excerpt:
Reporter: "Yes Mr. Zubrin, it's certainly an impressive design. What will be in the nose of the craft?"
Mr. Zurbin: "As you can see from this diagram, the nose of the craft will contain "science". Next question."
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
CO2 sublimates, doesn't it? Might not make any difference for their application though.
Its a good idea NOT to have to import hydrocarbons as the nearest filling station is back here, far far away. CO2 is pretty plentiful.
The wings holding the solar panels would have to be self-cleaning though.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
more than a month using its solar cells to refuel and recharge its batteries before it could take off again."
This may well be a feature. Conventional wisdom, when fishing or hunting, is it pays not to move around too much.
Easily tested on earth too.
A really big one might help with moon mining as proposed here. Of course it would literally have to hop as wings are useless on the moon. Low gravity may make the concept practical and gas could be 'waste' from the He3 extraction.
Imagine a whole mining-processing plant hopping about the moon.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
This thing is equipped with a warhead of PURE SCIENCE!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
When you snatch the CO2 from the air, then it will be time for you to leave.
confucious
Them martians have been scaring people on this planet for years with their UFOs. Now it's our turn.
What kind of response times do you get from mars? I mean, could you interactively fly this thing, or would you just kind of point it and it would end up in some random location, in that general direction?
If the latter, what's the advantage over, say, one of those tumbleweed style bots. What about a tumbleweed with "brakes", that can stop, expore, then curl back up into a ball and move along?
Mars exploration sounds like a candidate for the KISS principle to me.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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?
Look, your "logic" has no place here. This is the land of knee jerk, uninformed, karma whoring comments. Please, take your "understanding of concepts" elsewhere.
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Crudely Drawn Games
Who thinks the guy looks like a prototype of a hung-over russian mad scientist?
(No offence to any russian mad scientist having hang-over mind you....)
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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
Your objection to "ruining" is undermined when the planet is already ruined. It's a long-held theory that solar wind blew the atmosphere right off the planet, making it totally uninhabitable. As an added bonus, there's no more geothermal energy to gain from the planet and it's too far away from the sun to farm a significant amount of solar energy, so one could say definitively that mars is here and forevermore useless.
On a more general note, it frustrates me whenever I hear people comment that we shouldn't pollute the moon, or throw nuclear waste in to the sun -- as if these places had a delicate ecosystem that some human-defined "pollution" would upset. There is so much room in the universe; in the end, only loony environmentalists care whether a hundred thousand tons of used beanie babies end up "recycled" on earth, or dumped on the moon.
karma: ouch!
RTG's don't release any chemical compounds, they are only used as heat sources (in this case heating banks of thermocouples to generate electricity) - the fuel pellets are usually bound in plastic to make handling safer.
Okay... ummm.... why don't you share your tinfoil hat with Mars to protect it from the space probes?
Sorry but this probe does not damage mars in anyway. it adds no CO2 to the atmosphere. We should not worry about it because there is nothing to worry about.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I remember some dude that had created Mars planes on a simulator, using real NASA-supplied data.
His findings: low gravity and ultrathin atmosphere are bitches.
For one, the ultrathin atmosphere (air density 1% of the Earth's) requires huge wings and a very high speed to generate enough lift.
Taking-off and landing are almost impossible. The planes needs a speed of 400 knots to take off. Landing is very... hard because low gravity prevents you from using brakes, and low air density from using reverse thrust.
Of course, the Gashopper isn't supposed to take off or land (it could not anyway). However, it'd still need massive horsepower and huge wings - all of which make it hard to cram the Mars plane into a space probe.
Bottom line: if the plane has been successfully tested on Earth, it is unlikely to work on Mars.
Disclaimer: I am not a Mars aerospace engineer. But that guy's findings were definitely interesting.
A really big one might help with moon mining as proposed here. Of course it would literally have to hop as wings are useless on the moon.
The plan is to use stored, compressed atmospheric gasses as propellant for a winged aircraft.
Sit back, and think about this for a second.
Now, tell me again about how this would work on the moon except for the wings.
You can't take the sky from me...
Gravity's a real bitch.
The physics club at the local university used to sell buttons that read "Friction is a drag", and "Gravity is a downer".
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The other side of the coin is that an Earth vehicle can save energy by using lift to take off horizontally, because the atmosphere is thicker. A martian one will probably need to take off vertically, and won't experience lift until it reaches a much higher cruising speed. Once at that speed, it can fly a long way without as much drag, but once you want to land you have to worry about slowing down, so the device had better measure its fuel carefully or have a large wingspan that is retracted just before landing, once again vertically.
Although it sounds less practical than using the same energy for rovers, it might be OK as a proof-of-concept (or proof-of-bad-idea) for a future mission that uses the CO2 to leave orbit on a return trip.
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.
Last Friday (Nov. 19) was a big milestone for many small companies like Robter Zubrin's. This is when NASA announced its 2004 SBIR Phase I awards. And yes, this Gashopper is one of them.
a rds/2004topic.html There's really some innovative stuff going on. Also, to the future rocket scientists out there: if you want to work in aerospace, this is an excellent site to find small companies doing NASA subcontracting.
Check them all out at: http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/sbir2004/phase1/aw
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
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.