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Comment by indiecore | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how we'd explore it. I guess land a probe with a transmitting station near it and have a rover on a wire go fall in?

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Could we get a flying drone down there?

What does it take to make flight happen on Mars? The air is thinner, so would more force be required for airplanes and helicopters to fly? How well would hot-air or helium inflatables work, compared to Earth?

X-Plane had some interesting observations about the physics of flying on mars a few years back.

http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html

Wow, that's gotta be one of the most pumped things I've ever read.

Here's a great video[1] I've just seen about flying on mars courtesy of a comment sadly further down.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YQBuuhh76A&feature=play...

Here's some info on using airplanes (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/programmissions/missions/missiontyp...) and balloons (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/programmissions/missions/missiontyp...) on Mars. In short: it's possible.

0.4 g's...

Yes, there is work going on to achieve that. Airplanes can fly quite well in thinner air, they just have to fly faster or have bigger wings. I don't know about helicopters or balloons, but there is a project which aims to bring a solar-powered airplane to Mars. The main problem are the batteries as they have to hold enough energy to fly trough the night.

See e.g.:

Noth A., Engel W., Siegwart R. Recent Progresses on the Martian Solar Airplane Project Sky-Sailor In Proceedings of the 9th ESA Workshop on Advanced Space Technologies for Robotics (ASTRA 2006), Noordwick, Netherland, 2006. [http://www.sky-sailor.ethz.ch/docs/Sky-Sailor-ASTRA2006_Noth...]

Noth, A., Bouabdallah, S., Michaud, S., Siegwart, R. and Engel, W. SKY-SAILOR Design of an autonomous solar powered martian airplane. In Proceedings of the 8th ESA Workshop on Advanced Space Technologies for Robotics, (ASTRA 2004), Noordwick, Netherland,2004. [http://www.sky-sailor.ethz.ch/docs/Sky-Sailor-ASTRA2004_Noth...]

Noth, A., Engel, W. and Siegwart, R. Flying Solo and Solar to Mars - Global Design of a Solar Autonomous Airplane for Sustainable Flight. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 3, pp 44-52, Sept. 2006. [http://www.sky-sailor.ethz.ch/docs/Flying_Solo_and_Solar_to_...]

See http://www.sky-sailor.ethz.ch/ as well for more.

This 2009 TEDx talk is about flying an airplane on Mars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YQBuuhh76A

The air is much thinner but they made a manned plane fly 85000 feet high at Mach 3.3 in the 70s. It wouldn't probably be that hard to make an unmanned drone capable of flying on Mars.

To transport and ensure it's operational by the time it gets there, might be a completely different matter, though.

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