Hi all
If you have been following Mars exploration for a while, you may remember the proposal to fly a miniature airplane on Marsin 2003 to commemorate the centenary of the Wright bros' first flight.
See for example http://quest.nasa.gov/aero/planetary/MarsAir.html
I am looking for some higher resolution of the images of the unfolding sequence at the top of that article, and I remember seeing them somewhere on the net, but I can't find them any longer. Anybody knows the site, or has higher res versions saved or has the issue of "Air & Space" (December 1999) and can make a scan for me? I had that but I can't find it anymore after I moved...
Would this not be a more appropriate starting point?
http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/multimedia.html#animations
It is not the same mission, the one I am talking about is the 1999 pre-Polar Lander proposal to fly in 2003. The site is for the mission proposed in 2003 to fly in 2007
There's an interesting passage in that 1999 http://quest.nasa.gov/aero/planetary/MarsAir.html about the Mars Airplane:
...Weighing about 400 pounds, it would fly for six hours or so, land, study the surface, then take off a month later for more cruising. The Ames people even had a target in mind: Gusev Crater, which, evidence suggests, may have once been a lakebed. Water inside the crater might have been warmed by a large volcano more than 100 miles to the north. Many researchers-especially at Ames, where the crater has a particularly passionate set of advocates-think Gusev could hold traces of past Martian life...
Imagine what would have happened if that mission had gotten off the ground (pun intended), and arrived at Gusev only to find a basalt surface. A month later it heads for the Columbia Hills and can't find a place to land. It sets down in the flat plains beyond Husband Hill and well away from Homeplate and never studies the silica soils or see the layered rocks. Sure it could reach other areas (perhaps) but would it have made the same discoveries a rover has been able to do? I wonder? Of course, these are same assumptions that the MER team made about Gusev.
Anyway.... images for the Mars Aircraft....called http://www.msss.com/mage_release/kittyhawk.jpg as I recall. Also there was MAGE (Mars Airborne Geophysical Explorer).
The movie of the deployment http://www.msss.com/mage_release/mage_movie.mpg may be of some use.
Now I remember that plane!
http://www.mars3d.com/PWMarsExplorer3.htm
I did it in 3DS Max about 10 years ago!
I think that the very high resolution cameras on orbiting spacecraft pretty much killed off the appeal of aircraft on Mars from a scientific view. There area a few missions they could do better such as studying remnant magnetism or ground water/ice at high resolution. However, the area they could cover would be small, the design is difficult, and data relay would be a bitch.
I personally always found the idea romantic, though.
There are some nice images of the 1999 Mars aircraft proposal presented alongside a replica Wright Flyer on Ames' image gallery
http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/ails/printPreview.php?rid=2376
http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/ails/printPreview.php?rid=2377
http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/ails/printPreview.php?rid=2391
http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/ails/printPreview.php?rid=2392
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