NEW YORK: NASA has been talking about sending airplanes to Mars for more than a decade, but the revolution in small satellites and drone airplanes just might turn the concept into a reality at last.
If the plan being hatched at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center works out, a folded-up glider could take a piggyback ride to the Red Planet in the 2022-2024 time frame, inside a spacecraft that would also carry a Mars rover.
During the cruise to Mars, the plane’s fuselage and its 2-foot-wide (60-centimeter-wide) wings would be folded up inside a 3U CubeSat receptacle, which is about as big as a loaf of bread. A similarly sized satellite held the LightSail solar sail experiment that went through a successful orbital tryout last month.
“The aircraft would be part of the ballast that would be ejected from the aeroshell that takes the Mars rover to the planet,” Al Bowers, NASA Armstrong’s chief scientist, explained in a news release. “It would be able to deploy and fly in the Martian atmosphere, and glide down and land.”
During the roughly 10-minute flight, the glider could snap high-resolution images of the terrain over a stretch of 20 miles (32 kilometers) and transmit the pictures back to Earth. Such imagery could help scientists determine the suitability of a given site for a future astronaut mission, Bowers said.
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