Serious question that people here may or may not know the answer to. They keep making Mars Landers. With all the tech advances in the drone world, what are the pros/cons of a Mars Drone that flies around instead of rolling around on wheels?
Providing energy for the aircraft is a problem as well. Satellites just can keep going on, but a hydrazine fueled or battery powered plane would have a mission length counted in hours. With 1% air density and 40% gravity, I get about a factor of six speed requirement compared to earth. Have to stay below the 240 m/s speed of sound.
If you had a battery plane with solar panels that could land to gather energy, then it could fly again, but the landing and takeoff might be extremely hazardous, with rocks and very high speeds.
> If you had a battery plane with solar panels that could land to gather energy, then it could fly again, but the landing and takeoff might be extremely hazardous, with rocks and very high speeds.
I've also wondered if you could use beamed microwave power to power a Mars airplane. For example, you could have a solar base station on the surface, and every hour or so the airplane would circle it closely and recharge its batteries. This only makes sense if you can make the microwave rectenna on the airplane much lighter than the equivalent solar cells. An airplane that never needs to land has some definite advantages. On the other hand, an easy way of acquiring geological samples is not one of them.
ARES was only expected to fly about an hour, which does seem pretty pointless to me. A rocket propelled Mars plane is hampered by its need to carry oxidizer as well as fuel. But it seems like you still ought to be able to get multiple hours of flight out of it -- the Rutan Voyager didn't need to carry oxygen, but on the other hand it flew for nine days.
Another alternative is that you can use CO2 as an oxidizer -- Magnesium, for example, will burn in a C02 environment. Building a jet engine that runs on Magnesium is probably a non-trivial exercise, though!
If you really want to build a Mars airplane, I think nuclear is clearly the way to go. I don't know how you would test it though, since we tend to frown on running unshielded nuclear reactors these days.
The air is very very thin. It could not dig or brush or use a microscope or put the samples in an oven or chemical analyzers. Also we already have good overhead images from satellites. Planes have been proposed nevertheless.
Sure, but I mean, images from 50 feet away are gonna be higher resolution than images from 2 miles away, yes? So it seems to me that if they could get some drones flying around, they could do some cool things like collect samples for a regular Mars Lander to process or get higher res photos or do some spectrometry or something over a wider range than a lander can do... right?
Good search terms for this would be "mars aerobot". This turns up lots of good links for LTA (lighter than air) mission concepts, and a couple of offhand mentions of HTA concepts.
These are all separate from the ARES concept that is already linked nearby.
I think flying drone explorers would make more sense on Venus instead of Mars. They could spend most of the time connected to solar-cell-covered balloons 50km above the surface and occasionally dip down into the oven for a brief look.
Randall Munroe has a nice writeup about flying on Mars, here. Short answer: the air is so thin, a drone would have to fly at Mach 1 just to remain airborne. Also, because the air is so thin, at that speed the plane would be darn near impossible to turn: the plane itself would rotate but not change course.
Well, we have a lot of satellites around earth, but we still have a lot of uses for drones, right? So I guess the answer is no, they don't count for this particular question... :)
Why won't they send something that can directly detect the existence of microbes? It seems they're always after indirect signs. The focus this time seems purely geological in nature.
NASA doesn't do manned launches at the moment. There are several other providers for unmanned launches (including for Mars payloads). SpaceX has never done anything beyond Earth orbit, so they'd be an unlikely choice for this.
