NASA plans robot rocket aeroplane to fly above Mars

Lets hope...

they get plane sailing.

ARES

"The droid aeroplane is known, slightly confusingly, as ARES (Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor), "

Oh come on, that's clearly ARSES.

Your obviously not an Aerospace Engineer, AC

This looks positively mouth watering to me... OK life expectancy's shit but the idea of designing something that would be the first thing designed to fly, and i mean properly fly, in a non-earth atmosphere (landers do not fly, they crash. And parachutes are just a slow way of crashing...) is seriously intriguing. Not to mention the idea of trying to design something the size of a light aircraft to fit inside a rocket and then to unfold whilst plummeting to the martain surface at a dizzying rate of knots... The techincal challenges are awesome - thats why i became an aerospace boffin in the first place!

Bring it on...!

Nuclear air turbines

You 'just' need to use the nuclear fuel to heat the air inside the combustion chamber of the turbine.

Also, it can use the turbine to move a small electric generator, wich can be used to start the rotation of the engine, if the initial airspeed isn't up to it.

Really easy to test, just 1 moving part, very very long endurance ( as long as the fuel is hot enough )

Stuff the hinges. An inflatable.

An inflatable wing with spray on flexible solar panels seems like something that could be doable in a very favourable weight envelope. It might well be possible to get close to neutral bouyancy if hydrogen is used as the inflating gas. It would then only take a very small amount of thrust to keep the plane airborne.

For that matter, a semi rigid hydrogen balloon with a heating element would make a decent small payload carrier if they could be made light enough to dump a dozen or more with a single Discovery mission. Bonus points for spray on solar power.

X-Plane

I think X-Plane has/had a Mars flight simulation built into it. Very awkward flight regime due to the thinness of the atmosphere (you have to fly very, very fast in true groundspeed terms yet with low equivalent true airspeed: minimum control action, else you stall the plane - a very odd combination).

Presumably the thinness of the atmosphere would also screw up attempts at lighter-than-air flight too, but I'll let others comment on that.

Personally I would rather a decent sized rover, or multiple rovers, to scout around the red planet. I mean, what exactly do they expect to find on Mars? Water? Life? Airports?

Vulture 1?

Surely El Reg's experience with the PARIS project and Vulture 1 (how's that coming along, by the way?) will prove useful to the NASA boffins.

Reminds me

What's happening to your paper plane expidition? PARIS?

cost vs science

Normally I'm all for spending money on science, I say we should spend as much as we can. But for the billions this would cost, it doesn't seem worth it, especially in the press.

Everybody loves the twin rovers, they've lasted years, and years past their expected date. This on the other hand would have a similar price tag (research, prototypes, testing, more testing, etc is the majority of the cost), but only get an hour and a half of data. While I realize that's a ton for scientists, and can take years to go through, it's a lot of risk for relatively little gain.

And there is a lot more risk to a flying machine than a rover, after the rover lands (crashes), as long as it boots it can do science, one of the rovers has been running for years with a bum wheel. A plane on the other hand would have to initialize almost perfectly, if the wings don't lock, or don't bend far enough, or the engine clogs, or the sensors jam, etc, then you have a very expensive unprotected dead weight falling to the ground.

Wouldn't an inflatable be more cost effective? It would need only a small power source to move, and give more controllabillity, you could hover over an interest spot on the ground, or in an especially fluffy cloud. And as long as it inflates and holds pressure, it won't crash, even if every part on it fails except a camera and the balloon, it would still move in the atmosphere and it would be useful.

Why go to all that effort for 90 minutes?

What's wrong with a balloon or even plural?

IMO this seems to be more of an engineers wet dream than a genuinely useful space mission.

You're welcome

That's 'you're', but why would anyone dream of whipping out a spelling lame a boffin? *ZING*

Seriously though, the flight time is pants. How's about this for a crazy idea....a balloon that can float around, maybe even with a propulsion system for steering. That's old school flying, and could go on for a very long time. But no, the rocket powered flyboys with their noisy, hypersonic, dick extensions wouldn't want to go for staying power when they can 'thrust, thrust, wham bam thank you martian ma'am.'.

Paris, because she know's about the whamming and the bamming.

Why the hell a rocket plane?

. Why not use a balloon? You could put solar panels on top, have the same long life like the rovers + cover huge amount of territory. Sure you are at the mercy of the wind, but same thing with a plane, but with only 1.5 hours to work with. Plus a balloon could tell you much more about the atmosphere there by raising or lowering, charting currents etc. I think a balloon would have a lower chance for catastrophic failure.

@"Why go to all that effort for ninety minutes?"

That's what my wife said.

Ba-ding!

Ballons

I'm with the Balloonists. A blimp sounds a much better idea. Ok propellors might not work or work well but even if the thing was just left do drift in the wind in high atmosphere is could provide a lot of interesting data and last for a lot longer.