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Aerial Drone To Hunt For Life On Mars

Posted by Soulskill on from the care-for-some-martian-venison dept.

astroengine writes "What if the Martian terrain is too rugged for a rover to traverse? How do we study surface features that are too small for an orbiter to resolve? If selected by NASA, the Aerial Regional-Scale Environment Surveyor (ARES) could soar high above the Martian landscape, getting a unique birds-eye view of the Red Planet. Its primary mission is to sniff out potential microbial-life-generating gases like methane, but it would also be an ideal reconnaissance vehicle to find future landing sites for a manned expedition. Prototypes of the rocket-powered drone have been successfully flown here on Earth, so will we see ARES on Mars any time soon?"

2 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Any time soon? by fructose · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not likely. This project has been around for several years now. Here's a story where they hope to get DARPA to pay for it. And it's was already around for years before that. The problem with it? Real time control. The plane would have to be able to direct it's own flight and research with minimal input from Earth becasue of the time lag in commands. Controlling a Global Hawk or Predator from half way around the world isn't tough. Flying a UAV on another planet? That's tough. Look what happened to poor Spirit.

  2. Re:Rocket-powered? by vlm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm no expert, but since the atmospheric pressure on Mars is so low propellers/balloons etc probably won't work very well.

    Jet engines work pretty well at low pressure with some cooling issues. The killer is you need something that burns in mostly carbon dioxide (liquid fluorine?)

    The killer for propellers is its just a rotating airfoil (like a helicopter blade) and the speed of sound drops with density. And classical prop designs are an utter failure when supersonic.

    The killer for balloons is a completely different problem, the overall vehicle needs to be less dense than the atmosphere it displaces. Which is just barely possible to do on earth. Not going to work on Mars.

    Flying on Mars is non-trivial. See the X-Plane guys

    http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger