Mars Airplane 2003 proposal Options

[Paolo]

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...

[Astro0]

There's an interesting passage in that 1999 article 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 Kittyhawk as I recall. Also there was MAGE (Mars Airborne Geophysical Explorer).
The movie of the deployment here may be of some use.

[mcaplinger]

Also known as MAGE (Mars Airborne Geophysical Explorer).

It's important to note that there have been many Mars airplane proposals with various combinations of proposers and many different mission profiles. The Gusev land-and-take-off-again proposal was all NASA Ames, I believe. MAGE was a traverse of Valles Marineris with no take-off capability and was a team of MSSS, NRL, OSC, and Ames. The last one I know of, ARES, was managed by NASA Langley and involved a whole bunch of groups (but not Ames).

MAGE: http://www.msss.com/mage_release/index.html