NASA plane soars over Mars Dec 17, 2003. Live videos of unmanned Kitty Hawk's unique vantage point closer than orbiting satellites, more sweeping than those of surface robots. The first 3 Discovery missions - the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft, Mars Pathfinder and Lunar Prospector - launched on time, under budget. 3 more will visit comets and sample solar winds. NASA plans to hurl a spacecraft at Mars every couple of years for the next decade. MAGE, Mars Airborne Geophysical Explorer, promises matchless views. Orbiting spacecraft snap pictures of Mars one skinny strip at a time but can't make out features smaller than 6 feet square.
Sojourner, nuzzling rocks, wandered 300 yards. Flying half a mile over Mars' surface Kitty Hawk's videos and photos would capture details a few inches square. Kitty Hawk would cover 1,100 miles of terrain in 3 hours, returning 50 billion bits of data to Earth before crashing. Instruments sensing gravity and magnetic fields would reveal underground rock patterns. A thermal infrared imaging spectrometer provides clues to the rock's composition. Measuring electric fields may tell if liquid water - the prime prerequisite for life - lies within 5 or 6 miles of the surface because water changes rock's electrical conductivity. Serious Martian airplane studies were first done 2 decades ago when engineers tried to follow up Viking's missions. The original plan was to fold the plane into an entry vehicle a Viking spacecraft would deliver to Mars. There the plane would pop out buoyed by a parachute and unfold its wings. Using rocket fuel it would fly in daylight hours, land at sunset and take off again the next day.
2 years ago Mars flight teams dusted off the concept, made the plane smaller and simpler and submitted it as a possible Discovery mission. NASA rejected it as still too complicated. Tinkering more, they eliminated takeoffs and landings, trimming total Mars flight time to a few hours. Because of that the plane won't have to survive extreme day and night temperature differences on Mars' surface. There's no landing gear, no rocket propulsion system. Navigation is simpler because the plane would get nowhere near the ground until its work was done.
The Naval Research Laboratory would build the plane. Orbital Sciences would build the spacecraft carrying it to Mars, as well as the cocoon protecting the plane as it enters Mars' atmosphere. Engineers mimic the Mars Pathfinder as much as possible, taking its heritage as the Kitty Hawk mission's basis. The main difference is this time the Mars spacecraft will deliver a plane instead of a rover.
NASA targets Valles Marineris, one of Mars' biggest and most geologically and biologically intriguing features. The 3000-mile wide canyon runs out from an enormous bulge on Mars' surface, apparently made by volcanic activity, formed by a type of faulting in which the ground pulls apart and a block of rock sinks, forming a bottom. The canyon walls are striped with rock layers, that on Earth would have been deposited by water or volcanic lava flows. What are these layers made of? How were they laid down? It's a big hole in the ground caused by planetary-scale forces. Since its formation material was transported into it by landslide or flowing water. There may have once been lakes in the canyon bottom.
While the canyon is the kind of place explorers might look in for signs of past life, it's unlikely a spacecraft would go there to bring back rock samples. The terrain is too rough. Yet here a deep cross-section of Mars is exposed, including rocks billions of years old, with important clues about Mars' overall history. For example, if Mars was substantially water-carved it means there was a lot of water there at one time, and water may still exist under the surface. The plane would fly 5.5 miles above zero point, an altitude serving the same reference function as sea level on Earth. Valles Marineris' walls rise 5 miles above zero point. The plane would soar 1/2 mile above the ground.
Mars' atmosphere, 1/100th as dense as Earth's, is still thick enough to support flight. An experimental NASA plane's flight over Hawaii demonstrates the point, reaching 80,000 feet. Hawaii's atmosphere is 3 times denser than Mars'. Mars' gravity is weaker. The plane on Mars would weigh a third of what it weighs on Earth. Effects canceling each other out make atmospheric conditions equivalent.
VOICES OF OUR TIME - Alan Binder
Clearly the 20th century's most important development is space exploration. Apollo didn't open doors for further space exploration because we threw the opportunity away. The big political development was the fall of communism. It's nice to have nuclear annihilation threats gone. Now we can beat swords into plowshares and explore space. Necessity is the mother of invention. Until now, war was the mother of necessity. Space offers better alternatives: expansion beyond Earth. 100 years will bring well-developed moon, Mars or even Mercury colonies. We'll explore our solar system with manned or unmanned missions and send unmanned probes to other solar systems.
Gilroy resident Alan Binder, founder and director of Lunar Research Institute and principal investigator for the Lunar Prospector spacecraft which crashed on the moon, moved to Tucson AZ to research Prospector's data.