Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/13/nasa-has-a-possible-ingenuity-successor-and-her-name-is-maggie.html
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An interesting design. Super inefficient during takeoff, but with solar panels that doesn’t matter as much. It’s a tradeoff of individual flight run-time/range vs mission duration. As NASA’s been really good at getting endurance out of their robotic craft, this seems like it plays into their strengths.
But it doesn’t look stable enough to withstand a strong wind while on the ground. I hope they have a good handle on Martian weather so they can move the craft around to avoid storms.
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Huh. At 2:15 - that fluid dynamics animation showing the slipstream bend down over the top of the wing threw me - from my laymans understanding of how wings work the air pushed over the wing by the props should separate from the wing and keep going sideways instead of bend down.
Apparently this is the “deflected slipstream” technology mentioned in the article. In the animation you see an extra rectangle of flow lines against the back side of the wing. This would be a separate stream of air coming out vents near the top of the flap, then getting sucked back in at a vent at the bottom of the flap and finally pumped back to the top of the flap by a small ducted fan /compressor thing in the body of the flap.
Apparently adding this second adjacent flow of air going top to bottom over the surface of the wing / flap can cause the main slipstream from the props to ‘follow’ it around the bend. Nifty!
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Fear not! Martin storms can blow at about 60 mph, but at just 1% of our air pressure that’s not really much force. Lots of souces say that would only feel like a light breeze.
In an interview Andy Weir admitted that he knew that when he wrote The Martian, but he “wanted nature to throw the first punch” in his story, so he made the storm unrealistically powerful for that purpose.
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i was surprised to see that the wings aren’t folded at launch. i wonder if maybe that means they also have to be strong enough to withstand the forces of launch and landing.
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The craft is only able to fly in that 1% earth-density atmosphere because it has an enormous wing area to weight ratio. Due to the gravity difference it would probably need a wing 33 times larger than the equivalent earth airplane, A 60 mph Martian wind would cause at least as much problem for that craft as it would to a similar capacity aircraft on earth.
The normal procedure for having an outdoor aircraft survive a windstorm is to tie it down; clearly not an option here. So avoiding bad weather seems sensible.
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Completely blew my mind when I read about flight being easier on high gravity planets because of the denser atmosphere. Totally counterintuitive.
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