Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
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Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#2So why not a blimp? I did not see any mention why they did not consider this though they did mention the Soviets using balloons on Venus. Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?
Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#3So why not a blimp? I did not see any mention why they did not consider this though they did mention the Soviets using balloons on Venus. Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?
>Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?
Yes
Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#4So why not a blimp? I did not see any mention why they did not consider this though they did mention the Soviets using balloons on Venus. Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?
It sounds like it might be feasible: the atmosphere on the surface of Mars is described as the equivalent of Earth at "100,000 feet" (30 km) but the record for a weather balloon is 53km, and balloons carrying people have gone as high as 40km.
The helicopter being proposed is "the size of a softball", though, and not the main focus of the mission. The high altitude weather balloons have been much bigger and would probably need a dedicated mission.
Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#5Why does the BBC use "Nasa" instead of "NASA"?
Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#6So why not a blimp? I did not see any mention why they did not consider this though they did mention the Soviets using balloons on Venus. Is the air too thin to support any sort of lighter than air vehicle?
It sounds like it might be feasible: the atmosphere on the surface of Mars is described as the equivalent of Earth at "100,000 feet" (30 km) but the record for a weather balloon is 53km, and balloons carrying people have gone as high as 40km. The helicopter being proposed is "the size of a softball", though, and not the main focus of the mission. The high altitude weather balloons have been much bigger and would prob…
Why don't they test the helicopter at 100k feet then?
Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#7It would be interesting to see how the helicopter handles potential dust storms which can have winds of up to 94 km/hr.[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Effect_of_dust...
Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#8Why does the BBC use "Nasa" instead of "NASA"?
>Where you would normally say the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201307021...
Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#9It would be interesting to see how the helicopter handles potential dust storms which can have winds of up to 94 km/hr.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Effect_of_dust...
That would be very interesting. I am pretty naive on the topic but one thing to keep in mind is that the force of martian wind is nothing like on earth as the atmosphere is around 1% as dense as ours. For reference, the winds in the Martian was one of the big literary devices used to help the story along but I don't think could actually happen
Re: Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
#10It would be interesting to see how the helicopter handles potential dust storms which can have winds of up to 94 km/hr.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Effect_of_dust...
Aren't they pretty mild despite this, thanks to the very low density of the atmosphere?