So, finally we have the good old Pentagon’s ‘Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’ coming up to rescue the snags experienced during NASA’s Mars exploration!
In the beginning of the year DARPA publicized its freshest program christened ‘Rapid Eye’ to reveal their state of the art technology comprising of rocket-delivered unmanned plane to survey the “hot spot.” This thought gives the U.S. president the overall situation of the same, this whole project was made public by DARPA Director Tony Tether, during Geoint 2007 Symposium in San Antonio. According to him, this whole idea has been picked up from the space agency, NASA.
Engineers from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and Langley Research Center in Virginia, who are busy venturing the “planetary aircraft,” confirmed some of their talks with DARPA, which would help them acclimatizing some of their theories.
We all know that since 70s, the question regarding flying an unmanned airplane above Mars’ surface has been put up time and again. Dale Reed, key researcher at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California, who died in 2005, managed to patent his design concerning foldable Mars airplane called the ‘Mini-Sniffer’ in 1977.
Again, in 1999, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin invigorated the thought by boosting up NASA to fly a plane over Mars to commemorate the Wright Brothers historical flight.
These ideas never got shaped up as many glitches came their way - budget, scientific and technical. Engineers analyzed these projects in wind tunnels, high-altitude tests and many more ordeals.
Tether and Larry Lemke commented that -
there’s actually relative agreement now that it’s technically feasible and not terribly risky. There is no reason why we can’t do this. They will be involved, but we’re going out on our normal process of a broad agency announcement to industry [saying] that we want this capability.
Up till now, airplanes that would soar on Martian surface are capable of flying between 5,000 to 10,000 feet (1,524 meters to 3,048 meters). On our planet, that would be somewhere around 100,000 feet (30,480 meters) thus keeping a perfect close-watch round the globe!
This new concept is actually U.S. Air Force’s reverie that would help them survey any ‘Hot Spot’ throughout our planet.
Via: Msnbc
