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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?"

14 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. UAV to hunt for life on Mars... by Chris+Burke · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:UAV to hunt for life on Mars... by eleuthero · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For all that the rest of it was a glorious romp through suspension of disbelief land, nuking anything from orbit has never made sense to me--why not "kinetic bombardment" or something similar... probably not the same level of immediate--"ooh, that would be bad" from the audience.

  2. Rocket-powered? by gman003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Rocket-powered? by Biogenesis · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      --
      ...just so Google finds it.
    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
    3. Re:Rocket-powered? by Lord+Byron+II · · Score: 3, Informative

      Balloons work off of the differential between the inside air pressure and the outside air pressure. If the outside air pressure is low, then even if you manage to generate a vacuum inside the balloon, the differential is still small and therefore so is the lift.

    4. Re:Rocket-powered? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Physics FAIL

      Pressures inside balloons (and anything else like water droplets for that matter) are actually higher than the ambient pressure by an amount related to the surface tension of the membrane or liquid-gas interface.

      Also, bouyancy works based on density differences, not pressure differences. You can have compress air to have as high a pressure as you want and it will still float so long as the final density is less than water's.

    5. Re:Rocket-powered? by Caerdwyn · · Score: 4, Informative

      Typical Mars surface air pressure varies between 6 and 10 millibars, depending upon season and land altitude. Assuming relatively low altitude flights, it's quite possible to build aircraft that can fly in that density (particularly given that Mars' surface gravity is only about 40% of Earth's). What are the constraints?

      1. Velocity. At 6 millibars, you're looking at a near-supersonic speed to stay aloft. Sure, that's not a big deal from a drag perspective when the air is that thin, but your propulsion system has to be able to maintain that. Can propellers do that? Yes. The XF88B could maintain 0.8 Mach.

      2. Flutter. Unlike drag, which is heavily dependent upon the product of air density, velocity and drag coefficient, flutter is only really dependent upon airspeed. Think of it as a kind of resonance. As the air flows over the wing, the wing vibrates like a guitar string. Aircraft have literally shaken themselves apart when they hit a critical airspeed; this remains an issue today (example: builders of the Van's Aircraft RV10 are warned about relying upon airspeed indicators if they have a turbocharged or supercharged motor, as at the service ceiling of 18000 feet the absolute airspeed max of around 250 knots will only be shown as 160 knots on most mechanical airspeed indicators... and at 250 knots, you're int he danger zone for flutter). This can be engineered around, though at the airspeeds necessary it won't be easy.

      3. Energy. So how do you propel this thing? Unless it's going to be a short mission, chemical propellants are right out (especially given that you need to carry both the fuel AND the oxidizer, as there's no "free" oxygen to be found. Solar-electric is being discussed, and may actually be viable; the plane would probably have to "race the sunset" to stay in sunlight constantly. This is very doable, though. At the equator, Mars has a curcumference of about 13,000 miles. At that size, with a 24.5 hour day, an aircraft would have to maintain a bit over 500mph to stay in sunlight. However, as this is likely to be near the speed necessary just to stay aloft anyway, it's a nonfactor. If you're powered enough to fly, you can stay in sunlight.

      Yep. There are problems. But none of it is insurmountable. How much tax increase are you willing to endure (and convince others to endure) to accomplish this? If that number's high enough... yes. It CAN be done, with propellers and lift from wings (as opposed to vectored thrust). The challenges are the power system and overcoming flutter, but these are solvable.

      --
      Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
    6. Re:Rocket-powered? by snookums · · Score: 5, Informative

      What the GP is getting as is that the theoretically most efficient aerostat you can build is one with a rigid shell and an evacuated interior. It's not really a balloon, per se, hence the confusion.

      Any actual balloon full of gas will always have less density differential than this, and thus generate less lift.

      In practice, the mass of extra material required to build a rigid shell generally outweighs any extra lift you could get over a hydrogen or helium balloon. Hence, you don't see evacuated aerostats outside science fiction (e.g. Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson).

      --
      Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
  3. A letter missing from the acronym by KDR_11k · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  4. ARSES by CosmicRabbit · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. 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.

  6. Re:first, nuclear waste, now, exhaust gases by biryokumaru · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!
  7. No one will ever walk there by Simonetta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.