Wouldn’t an airship be a more viable option for a long term mission on Mars?
http://www.gaerospace.com/space-exploration/planetary-aerobo...
With a thick atmo, plenty of sun, and not too much heat / cold in the upper layers. Venus is a _great_ place for balloons.
https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/venus-20070...
Taking off again can be done over days so you can power it with solar panels if you can’t fit an RTG.
I honestly don’t think winds would be that much of an issue they won’t be strong enough to structurally damage the airship they’ll blow it off sure but not break it apart, and crashing into things isn’t as much of a risk at any reasonable altitudes no buildings no trees, sure there are cliffs and mountains but that can be solved with altitude.
At least one "garage engineer" was selected this last round.
Low gravity means you need less lift, but low gravity also means the weight of the surrounding air is less so you need more volume. I guess that cancels out.
I suspect it's not practical in atmosphere as thin as Mars, but maybe with a light enough or strong enough material it's possible? At any rate, you'd need an enormous volume just to lift relatively small payloads. And, just filling a balloon with hydrogen would probably make more sense in almost any situation.
At least one good thing Mars has going for it in terms of airships is that CO2 is more dense than Earth's atmosphere. Even nitrogen would be a weak lifting gas on Mars (though it's not available in abundance there as far as I know).
Wikipedia has some useful background information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship
They found a design that can work with current materials and lift 500kg worth of payload.
>”The tensegrity based design using current materials, accounting for losses due to deflection of the membrane and other factors, is capable of 500 kilograms of payload. If trends in the mass reduction capabilities of the tensegrity beam design continue to higher complexities, which is probable, then implementation of a complexity 4 beam will result in 1 to 1.5 tons of payload capacity. In addition, the tensegrity design has been shown to offer full deployability and can be collapsed for transport to Mars.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lo6k73/what_will_hap...
If there was a dedicated mission for a much larger helicopter, it would obviously be important for it to have a story for weathering these things.
The main issue would be the size of the balloon but honestly if we can make some origami rigid airframe a vacuum airship might actually work.
At that point controlling buoyancy is also less of an issue from a power perspective since you don’t need a large power reserve to land, and when you are on the ground you can wait until you have enough power to create sufficient vacuum in the airship.
Doing some quick math using the ideal shape of a sphere: Mars surface atmosphere is ~1/60th as dense as the Earth's so you'll wind up with 23x the surface area which at the reduced surface pressures of mars you'd be looking at around 15% of the total forces you'd have to resist. For a sphere that might just push it into the realm of possible options but to get to a 'pure' vacuum you need very fancy and heavy pumps that need cryogenic cooling beyond the difficulty of doing this with an actual blimp shape.
Even given the ability to make it you'd likely have issues with the process of getting it there if we're not assembling it in situ.
The winds are to weak because of the thin atmosphere and there aren’t that many things to crash into.
Since helicopters already outcompete zeppelins on Earth, on Mars where helicopters have a factor of 3 advantage over zeppelins, it’ll have an even harder time.
It’s equivalent to a zeppelin at around 100,000 ft at Earth. Possible, but not very practical.
If you would’ve asked people 10 years ago about flying helicopters on Mars plenty of them would say it’s not possible not because the math doesn’t work out, but because of what requirements the math spits out.
I can do the math for a helicopter for galactic hydrogen, it doesn’t mean engineering can make one. However a vacuum airship on Mars is very much possible, it’s just a heck of an engineering challenge but if you want to get to large payloads not to mention any substantial flight time it’s by far more realistic than a helicopter.
A zeppelin could in principle work on Mars, but it'll be worse than a helicopter, all things being equal. Weather balloons can work fine at those air pressures, but they don't control their position.
34% better, in aviation, may easily make the difference between practical and not. In the case of Ingenuity, it appears to have made the difference between a need for custom SotA vs. COTS kit.
What computing could usefully be offloaded to the rover is very limited. Compressing video, maybe, and that just for power budget. I think Ingenuity has >10x MIPS than Perseverence.
Reduce Ingenuity’s flight time by 10%, and it would still be practical.
You clearly have not kept up on CPU design. ISAs are the same, but implementations have been through 3 generations.
You clearly have not kept up on motor performance. Nothing theoretical has changed, but COTS motors are much better executed than could be had 10 years ago.
You clearly have not kept up on solar performance. While absolute efficiency has not increased much, weight has. Furthermore, and of greater moment here, dust-repellent coatings have improved.
The aggregate improvement is much better than 34%.