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MARTIAN WINGS AND THE TURNING POINT OF DATA COLLECTION AND RESEARCH

Throughout the era of comics, artists have speculated and super beings have travelled to Mars in vehicles that work on their own, no not only automatic but also perpetual. Though Mars has its own huge fan base now, due to speculations around martian inhabitation, perpetual motion machines have attracted curious minds of the philosophers since the early 1168 and around by Indian Mathematician and Philosopher, Bhaskara I(the first).





Researchers and engineers at NASA, have been working and recently finished making a working prototype for their new Sailplanes, in collaboration with University of Arizona, department of engineering and sensor technology, and the department of media and information. Laden with temperature and gas sensors and cameras for image collection, the sailplane would complement existing orbital spacecraft and land-based rovers to obtain data on Mars’s planetary boundary – the atmospheric layers between the planet’s surface and space.


Why bother?

The reason is simple, because the most vaguely studied yet happening region is that of the planetary boundary and layers of the atmosphere. Maybe we should hear it from the expert himself.

“You have this really important, critical piece in this planetary boundary layer in the first few kilometres above the ground… where all the exchanges between the surface and atmosphere happen,” explains Alexandre Kling, a research scientist in NASA’s Mars Climate Modeling Center, who worked on the study,

In an exclusive interview with COSMOS Magazine, Australia's leading science, sociology and technology magazines.

“This is where the dust is picked up and sent into the atmosphere, where trace gases are mixed, where the modulation of large-scale winds by mountain-valley flows happen. We just don’t have very much data about it.”






The idea of this Sailplane when published on Aerospace Journal, took the quest of Martian planetary boundary data collection quest by storm, and was like a new hope in this relatively new field of research.


Inspiration

It follows the landing of NASA’s tiny, two kilogram Ingenuity helicopter in Mars’s 45-kilometre wide Jezero crater last year – an event marking the debut of powered, controlled flight technology on another planet.


But reliance on solar powered motors limits Ingenuity’s flight duration to around three minutes of flight. It can fly just 12 metres above the surface. It’s because of these limitations that researchers jumped into the design of a craft that could harness the power of the Martian wind for propulsion and forgo reliance on other power sources. And the especially hostile and subtle Atmospheric conditions make it especially tricky to develop a flying device. But what do we do often, we have to use the problem itself for our benefits, and that is what was done.


The question posed by the study’s first author Adrien Bouskela, an aerospace engineering doctoral student from UArizona’s Micro Air Vehicles Laboratory, is the motivation for the sailplane’s design.


“How can you use the wind that’s there [and] the thermal dynamics that are there, to avoid using solar panels and relying on batteries that need to be recharged?”






Fortunately, Bouskela and colleagues didn’t need an out-of-this-world solution to solve the problem. Old age thinkers were right. Nature has answer to every problem. Bouskela had been trying to find a way to use the wind power and thermal dynamics, and it's heat flow to steer the device,with great efficiency, and nature had given him the Eureka moment. Using dynamic soaring, the sailplane utilises increases in horizontal wind speed with gaining altitude to continue flying long distances. It’s the same process albatrosses use to fly long distances without flapping their wings and expending crucial energy.


After lifting themselves up into fast, high-altitude air, albatrosses then turn their bodies to descend rapidly into regions of slower, low-altitude air. With the force of gravity providing downward acceleration, the albatross uses this momentum to slingshot itself back to higher altitudes. Continuously repeating this process enables albatross and other seabird species to cover thousands of kilometres of ocean, flap-free.


The Sailplane has no experiment lifespan, after completing its mission, it would continue collection of atmospheric data and intercepts signals to earth's data centers and the different land rovers present on Mars surface.

With a view to using the sailplane on larger Martian missions, the researchers’ focus now moves to deployment and testing.


While the design currently allows the craft to be packaged into miniature satellites no larger than a phone book, the UArizona team needs to decide whether the sailplane will unfold from the package or inflate and rigidise to full size, and if balloons or blimp drops will be involved in deployment.


The researchers are preparing to test experimental sailplanes at 15,000 feet (around 4570m) above the Earth’s surface, where atmospheric conditions are most like those the craft will encounter on Mars.

And if the text is successful, we already know, the rest would be history in the making.


THANKYOU




 
 
 

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