Nasa has developed a prototype drone aircraft destined to be the first to fly on Mars.
The Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars, or Prandtl-m, is a glider drone that's designed to piggyback on a rover and seek out landing sites for an eventual manned mission on the Red Planet.
The sleek spacecraft, which is shaped like a space-age boomerang, has a two-foot wingspan and weighs around 1.17kg when Earthbound -- though Mars's gravitational forces will slim it down to just 453g. It will be made from either fibreglass or carbon fibre and will be able to reach speeds of up to 20mph after gliding from more than 600 metres above the planet's surface.
The Mars rover isn't planned for launch until at least 2022, but the Prandtl-m is already preparing for its first test mission later this year. The drone will be released from a balloon at an altitude of 3,000 meters, designed to simulate the Martian atmosphere. A second flight, scheduled for 2016, will see the Prandtl-m airborne for at least five hours before landing back to Earth, while a final test would mimic the final craft's deployment from a CubeSat mini satellite.
These Earth missions, set to take place in either Arizona or Oregon, will let Nasa tweak the Prandtl-m's final design and monitor its flight, which is expected to last around 10 minutes on its actual Martian mission.
Al Bowers, Nasa Armstrong chief scientist and Prandtl-m program manager, said: "The aircraft would be part of the ballast that would be ejected from the aeroshell that takes the Mars rover to the planet. "It would be able to deploy and fly in the Martian atmosphere and glide down and land. The Prandtl-m could overfly some of the proposed landing sites for a future astronaut mission and send back to Earth very detailed high resolution photographic map images that could tell scientists about the suitability of those landing sites."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
