MARS MISSION
If you decided to fly along the Grand Canyon, you'd first have to stare down a slew of nasty regulations about where and when and how. But other planets have grander canyons and fewer bureaucratic limitations. Indeed, Wendy Calvin, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, wants to send an unmanned plane down Valles Marineris, a Martian canyon system about 2,400 miles long and more than five miles deep.
NASA's first studies on Martian aircraft date from the 1970s, but it wasn't until the recent renaissance in planetary exploration that various groups, including one for which Calvin was the principal scientist, got serious about the idea. Now a quirk of the calendar has got NASA fired up: There are only a few months every two years when spacecraft from Earth can get to Mars, and one of those is December 2003 - the 17th day of which is the centenary of the Wright brothers' first flight.
The Mars "micromission" is no easy task. Hitching a ride on a French rocket, the aircraft will have to tuck itself into an aeroshell less than three feet across. Once it hits the Martian atmosphere, the craft must break free of the shell and unfurl its wings while falling. Those wings then have to generate lift from air that is incredibly thin - roughly the same as that found 90,000 feet above Earth, according to Scott Hubbard, who leads the Mars airplane effort at NASA's Ames Research Center.
The current record for propeller-driven flight (Mars' atmosphere provides almost no oxygen for a jet to burn) is a tad over 80,000 feet, held by a mostly solar-powered, unpiloted vehicle called Pathfinder-Plus. (See "Ethernet at 60,000 Feet," Wired 7.06, page 150.) AeroVironment, the firm that created Pathfinder-Plus, hopes to reach 100,000 feet with its successor, Centurion, by 2001.
Calvin's team had suggested exploring with gliders, which can go a long way on Mars and, lacking engines, can carry a larger scientific payload. There's just one problem: The Wright brothers' place in history came from more than gliding, and NASA has specified that the craft must be powered.
Calvin's group and the people at Ames are not the only scientists with grand plans. NASA has yet to make its final decisions on the specifics of the mission, allowing for other researchers to bid on parts of the project. By the time all bids are in - probably late this summer - there may be enough blue-sky ideas to send a whole squadron to the red planet.
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