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Mars Gashopper Airplane Takes Flight
Saturday, 30 July 2005 09:29 amHow totally cool is this!
(reposted from the Mars Society email list. Go to http://www.marssociety.org to join.)
Pioneer Astronautics has demonstrated a new technology for flying around Mars.
The new flight system, called a gashopper, has now been sucessfully flown. The vehicle system works by acquiring CO2 from the Martian atmosphere with a pump (Mars atmosphere is 95% CO2), storing it in liquid form, then sending it through a preheated pellet bed to turn it into hot rocket exhaust to produce thrust for a flight vehicle.
The flight vehicle could either be a ballistic vehicle similar to the DCX vertical takeoff rocket, or a winged airplane that would take off and land like a Harrier, then transition to horizontal flight.
On Mars, a ballistic gashopper would be capable of flights of tens of kilometers per hop. A winged aircraft would be capable of hundreds of kilometers per flight.
After each landing, a small rover could be deployed for local exploration. While it is doing this, the gashopper would refuel from the atmosphere, using power from the solar panels on its wings to drive its CO2 acquisition pump. This procedure would take about a month, then the rover would be recalled, the pellet bed reheated, and the gashopper flown to a distant landing site to explore again.
The net result is a system that can fly repeatedly on Mars, conducting numerous aerial surveys and surface exploration at many diverse sites with a single spacecraft. Furthermore, unlike surface rovers, the gashopper would not be blocked by terrain obstacles. Also, since its exhaust is CO2, it would not contaminate landing sites with organics from a conventional rocket exhaust (which might confuse sensors looking for indigenous organics).
( Read more... )
(reposted from the Mars Society email list. Go to http://www.marssociety.org to join.)
Pioneer Astronautics has demonstrated a new technology for flying around Mars.
The new flight system, called a gashopper, has now been sucessfully flown. The vehicle system works by acquiring CO2 from the Martian atmosphere with a pump (Mars atmosphere is 95% CO2), storing it in liquid form, then sending it through a preheated pellet bed to turn it into hot rocket exhaust to produce thrust for a flight vehicle.
The flight vehicle could either be a ballistic vehicle similar to the DCX vertical takeoff rocket, or a winged airplane that would take off and land like a Harrier, then transition to horizontal flight.
On Mars, a ballistic gashopper would be capable of flights of tens of kilometers per hop. A winged aircraft would be capable of hundreds of kilometers per flight.
After each landing, a small rover could be deployed for local exploration. While it is doing this, the gashopper would refuel from the atmosphere, using power from the solar panels on its wings to drive its CO2 acquisition pump. This procedure would take about a month, then the rover would be recalled, the pellet bed reheated, and the gashopper flown to a distant landing site to explore again.
The net result is a system that can fly repeatedly on Mars, conducting numerous aerial surveys and surface exploration at many diverse sites with a single spacecraft. Furthermore, unlike surface rovers, the gashopper would not be blocked by terrain obstacles. Also, since its exhaust is CO2, it would not contaminate landing sites with organics from a conventional rocket exhaust (which might confuse sensors looking for indigenous organics).
( Read more... )