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Airplane Designed by Virginia's Langley Research Center May Go to Mars

Posted on: Monday, 28 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

Jul. 28--In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiapparelli examined Mars through a telescope and reported seeing channels. Impossible, everyone said.

In 1894, American astronomer Percival Lowell announced that intelligent beings had dug canals on Mars to irrigate their fields. Nuts, some responded.

In 1938, Orson Welles broadcast an invasion of Earth by bloodthirsty Martians and, quite frankly, a lot of people believed.

Now, scientists at NASA Langley Research Center want to send an airplane 35 million miles to fly just above the surface of the Red Planet, and they should find out this week if it's possible.

The airplane is one of four proposals that NASA is considering as the next step in its 20-year plan to explore Mars. It is the most novel approach, and one that nearly got off the ground in the late '90s. If not for budget cuts, a Langley airplane could have flown over Mars on Dec. 17, 2003, the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight.

Joel S. Levine, principal investigator of the airplane proposal, thinks the idea is too good to pass up.

"For the scientific community, it presents an awesome platform for studying Mars," he said. "The data we're going to get will rewrite the textbooks."

For two years, the Langley center in Hampton has pitched the Mars airplane as a viable space mission, in fact, as one of the most unique space missions ever.

In early 2001, NASA asked for ideas on what it called Scout, a budget-conscious mission that would answer questions raised by previous Mars explorations. NASA received 41 proposals, each about 10 pages long. Some suggested airplanes or gliders, including Langley's, which was written by three people in about a month. NASA trimmed the list to 25, and asked for more details.

In this longer proposal, issued in August 2002, Langley was the only institution to suggest a powered airplane. Four finalists, including Langley, were asked for more information.

By this time, more than 100 people at Langley, plus nine other agencies or universities, plus three private industries, were involved in the Mars airplane project.

In May, a 1,000-page proposal in two volumes was hand-delivered to NASA headquarters in Washington. Twenty reviewers came to Hampton on July 14 and grilled the Mars airplane team for eight hours on everything from science to scheduling.

Today, Levine is in Washington for a personal interview, a final chance to explain the scientific rationale of why the Mars airplane should be picked over the other three finalists.

In the end, only one person has to believe in the Mars airplane: Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science. Weiler will decide the winner, and whether an extraterrestrial airplane is an idea that can fly. His decision is expected by Aug. 4.

The Mars airplane is called ARES (pronounced AIR-eez), an easier name than Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey and the Greek name for Mars. It would gather data on atmosphere, climate, surface mineralogy, interior magnetism, geologic history, volcanism, water and the big question of life on Mars while flying about a mile above the planet's Southern Highlands.

The beauty of an airplane, Levine said, is that it cruises close to the surface, in a part of the atmosphere never before explored. Two of the other finalists are orbiters, which fly hundreds of miles above the planet and cover vast amounts of territory. The other finalist is a lander, which could examine a small patch of ground in great detail. An airplane, Levine said, can do both.

ARES would launch in September 2007, reach Mars in September 2008 and complete its mission on the day of arrival. It would fly for about 310 miles in one hour, making two U-turns along the way.

"Then we will descend, and land with style," said Robert D. Braun, proposal architect.

ARES will have three main objectives: to study areas of strong magnetism, an exciting discovery made by the 1996 orbiter Mars Global Surveyor; to study geology that is 4.6 billion years old, equal in age to the Earth but older than any rocks now found here; and to study atmospheric gases and water near the planet's surface.

The data can shed light on alluring questions: What was Earth like when it was formed? Are gases such as methane, that can be formed only by living organisms, found on Mars? Are volcanic gases present? Was Mars ever warm and wet? Did it ever have a planetary magnetic field? Is there water? Is there life?

The crustal magnetism study is unique to ARES, and team members hope that could help it win over the other finalists. Mars was thought for a long time to have no planetary magnetic field. Earth has such a field, which deflects radiation and solar winds that could rip away the atmosphere. Mars, which was apparently once warm enough to have oceans and rivers, has lost much of its protective atmosphere and is now cold, up to 100 degrees below zero, and bone dry.

It still has remnants of magnetism, frozen in the rocks of the Southern Highlands and oriented in east-west patterns.

"Not only were these magnetic features very, very unexpected, they were also lots stronger than anything we've seen on Earth," said Diana S. Blaney of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of ARES' science team. "When you have hot rock cooling in the presence of magnetic fields, it leaves a remnant. This was basically the discovery that led to plate tectonics on the Earth in the '60s, so you could tell the crust was moving apart and changing.

"It's pretty cool."

ARES would use instruments that no previous mission has carried to map the remnants of Mars' magnetic field, said James W. Head III of Brown University, also a member of ARES' science team.

"This is one of the most exciting discoveries," Head said. "Just incredible. What you want to do is see them at high resolution. That's where the airplane comes in. Hey! Let's fly two kilometers above the surface. That's one of the most exciting things that's happened in decades."

The ARES team hopes to figure out whether the crust of Mars ever moved around like Earth's crust is moving today, with rifts where volcanoes form and earthquakes where one plate grinds slowly over top of another, the same action that erased the first billion years of Earth history.

Those lost years are preserved on Mars, and geologists are hoping for a bonanza from ARES.

The plane would fly over impact craters formed when asteroids and other space debris hit the planet.

"Projectiles coming from outer space penetrate in and explode," Head said. "That excavates and ejects material from below. That's great! It means you can see material that might have come from different depths. From a geological point of view, we'd like to know how the crust formed. We're looking for mineral signatures that might give us a clue."

The ratio of gases in the atmosphere also can answer questions about early Mars. The 3-D structure of the wind will be examined to help with future landings. And, Levine said, the present on Mars could give clues to the future of Earth.

ARES has a 21-foot wingspan and looks like a sleek glider, but it would be powered by a rocket engine that fires in short pulses every five to 10 seconds, Braun said. It would carry a mass spectrometer and a point spectrometer in the nose, magnetometers in the wingtips and a tiny video camera in the tail that would allow the public to watch as the plane crosses the surface of Mars.

The plane folds in three places to fit inside a circular aeroshell. Launched by a Delta 2 rocket, the aeroshell would be powered by solar panels on the yearlong journey to Mars. Then comes the toughest part of the mission.

"The fundamental challenge is to turn this folded-up element into the flying airplane," said Henry S. Wright, chief systems engineer for ARES. "It's really the challenge of trying to quantify the environmental extremes. How fast are you going to be moving? How fast are you spinning or tumbling when you come out?"

The aeroshell would enter the Mars atmosphere -- mostly carbon dioxide -- and release a parachute to slow down from about Mach 2 to Mach .5. The heat shield would be released when the craft was about 5 miles above the surface. A truss mechanism holding ARES would slide down and release it. A small Drogue parachute attached to the tail would deploy, unfolding the tail and pulling the plane's nose into the wind. A guillotine device would sever cables holding the wings down and springs would snap them into position.

"At that point, it's an airplane," Wright said. "The pullout's complete, the risk is over, now it's the easy part. You turn on the engine, fly the mission and life is good."

The plane's designers know this will work because they have already flown a half-size ARES in Mars-like conditions. That was accomplished by hoisting the folded plane close to 20 miles high via balloon, and releasing it into the cold, thin fringes of Earth's atmosphere. The video camera in its tail recorded all systems working perfectly, and the plane flew the mission pattern and landed gently 90 minutes later.

A full-size model will be flight-tested in December, if Langley gets the go-ahead in August.

The airplane is small enough to be lightweight, easily supported by the thinner Martian atmosphere because Mars has only 40 percent of Earth's gravity, Braun said. But ARES is big enough that none of the instruments have to be miniaturized, which would add to the cost.

NASA has capped the Scout mission at $325 million, spread over five years. The ARES mission would distribute that among four NASA centers, including Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in California. Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas would build the airplane, the Charles Stark Draper Lab would build its computer and Lockheed Martin its spacecraft and entry system.

Flying an airplane on another planet would broaden the portfolio at Langley Research Center, now known for aeronautics and atmospheric science, said Stephen Sandford, director of the earth and space science program there. The joint venture should appeal to NASA's goal of becoming an agency working as one rather than 10 separate centers with their own projects, he said.

Even if ARES doesn't get the nod, Langley will still have a small role in Mars Scout because the center has provided expertise to the other finalists. But Langley has an intangible ace up its sleeve, one that also factors into the selection, Head noted.

"ARES is tremendously exciting, how it could be used on Mars in the future as well as on Venus, on Titan, maybe even on the gas giants. It's a real investment in the future," he said. "My first job was in Apollo. It convinced you that humans could do anything they wanted to. 'We're going to the moon.' Just incredible.

"With Langley, they have that Apollo spirit."

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To see more of the The Virginian-Pilot, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.pilotonline.com

(c) 2003, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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