Most of us engineers and air craft mechanics work overtime to keep planes that fly within the atmosphere of the planet safe and sturdy. Imagine building an airplane that will fly around Mars?
The Marsplane is being designed by Aurora to fly in the Martian atmosphere. While the design challenges are similar to other high-altitude aircraft, this airplanes literally needs to carry its own weight. The glider will be sent to Mars by rocket, folded up in a pod that will be dropped from the space capsule, unfold itself and fly around taking photographs of the Mars surface from within the Martian atmosphere.
The requirements imposed by an aeroshell less than three feet in diameter led to an innovative configuration and folding scheme for the aircraft’s wings and tail configuration. MarsFlyer™ was powered by a reliable and compact rocket propulsion system. In 1999, a rocket-powered prototype flew at low altitude, demonstrating the validity of the rocket concept. Later, many of MarsFlyer’s™ key features were integrated into Aurora’s latest Martian airplane design, which was the basis of NASA Langley’s Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey (ARES) proposal.
The ARES airplane is powered by a bi-propellant liquid fuel rocket. In addition to the science instruments payload of a magnetometer, mass spectrometer, point spectrometer, and high resolution camera, ARES will carry a tail-mounted video camera and the flight sensors required for control and navigation.
It is technological advances like this that will eventually filter through to the entire space program, as well as the terrestrial aircraft industry.
