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Aerial Drone To Hunt For Life On Mars
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?"
And will be carrying a Hellfire missile, just in case said life decides to get uppity.
Or just to make the end-of-life for the UAV much more exciting. Either way.
The enemies of Democracy are
Wouldn't something less fuel-hungry give a longer usable life, and thus be a better return on investment? Solar-powered propellers, or just a helium balloon, might make more sense, as every gram of fuel takes away from the payload.
Aerial Regional-Scale Environment Surveyor (ARES)
Even NASA has trolls apparently
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The acronym for Aerial Regional-Scale Environment Surveyor should instead be read as ARSES... Which kinda fits for a mission looking for methane emissions and germs.
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.
Ya, we're just running our A.R.S.E.S. all over it, aren't we?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Yeah, I'm sure it's not practical, but Mars apparently has some jaw-dropping vistas. I'd love to see a robotic blimp traversing the planet snapping pictures.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Or they're testing a full-scale model in one of their low speed wind tunnels and this is just another example of shitty science reporting. It is important to note that the atmosphere on Mars is significantly thinner than the one here on Earth, and wind tunnel testing usually uses Reynolds number as a similarity parameter rather than velocity, so it's completely possible that 100 mph in their wind tunnel is equivalent to 500 mph flight somewhere on Mars.
You have made me very angry - very angry indeed!
Are they finally expanding their search for Bin Laden?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
That depends on your definition of environment. Planting our Earth manufactured robot underneath a bunch of martian sand might have profound effects in the future, butterfly and all that.
It obviously does have a profound affect on the future in that it expands human knowledge concerning Mars considerably. But the sort of effect you're refer to is not a genuine change, but just a slight bump to a chaotic system (which it is reasonable to assume Martian weather is). All the good and bad parts of martian weather would happen anyway with the same frequency and we still would be relatively clueless as to what weather is to come. So it doesn't change anything for us nor does it change anything for any Martian life that happens to be there. The environment is not the second to second changes in Martian weather. It's the long term stuff which remains after you filter out the short term chaotic noise.
Though we are sterilizing landers, just to be safe (I wonder how that will look with eventual manned exploration - we can produce sterile lab animals, but...) - and tenuousness of Martian atmosphere means even a miniscule additions make a noticeable difference (like that methane mystery - which, in the end, represents an exceedingly small amounts)
You're mixing two different definitions of "sterile". Sterile animals simply are animals which can't reproduce. They remain chock full of microbes. Sterile landers are landers that have been exposed to adverse conditions in order to kill off bacteria and other microbes on the probe. The first few long term missions to Mars may involve sterilized humans, but that's because whoever their managers are don't want the sizable risks and obligations of pregnancy and birth to interfere with the missions.
No one is going to Mars: no one will ever walk there. Any announced Mars landing mission in the future will be quietly cancelled a few years after its announcement. There's not going to be any Apollo type mission to Mars.
Why do I say this?
Because the United States is broke. Not only is it broke but it is broken. Its financial system is paralyzed. The US government is too many trillions of dollars in debt. Whatever money that might have gone into a giant space project in the 20th century went instead into mortgauge fraud and pointless endless wars (that will be lost at great financial cost). The US economy is much more fragile than the government and news media is proclaiming it to be. There is no recovery, nor will there be, outside of the pronouncements of a cadre of paid-off economists and the accounting tricks of millions of government check-kiters.
There might be a project of a giant "Predator"-like drone that flys around in the Martian atmosphere, but I doubt it. Still the aerospace-NASA lobby can pull some strings and make a project like this happen. But there won't be many projects in space in the next 20-30 years. In 150-300 years, sure, who knows? But not in our lifetimes.
We haven't even begun to estimate the costs of the disruptions that will be caused by Peak Oil, Overpopulation, Global Warming, and fiscal collapse all happening at about the same time. My guess is that people will be so overwhelmed by the magnitude of these problems that any suggestion of massive space travel projects will be just laughed off.
Remember that it's easy to announce these massive space projects, and just as easy to quietly cancel them when no one but the Slashdaughters are paying attention.