Many of the society's members are engineers and scientists interested in testing components for eventual use in the study of Mars.
"If you launch a brick when there are a thousand people who are dying to send up a small payload, it's just a waste," Gentile said. "We're not interested in putting anything up there, so it might as well go to somebody who wants it." A lifelong space enthusiast who wants to get into the Air Force's test-pilot program and eventually go to Mars as an astronaut, Gentile said he got the idea of donating the payload when he attended the Mars Society's conference two weeks ago.
Within the Mars Society, there are plenty of people who are jumping at the opportunity to launch a small payload, said Robert Zubrin, prisident of the Mars society. The society has announced a design competition for the payload, and will award the launch to the winner, he said.
"I think that people can do a lot, especially since it's at low altitude. It's relatively easy to transmit, so you don't have to use a lot of weight on a communications system," Zubrin said.
One of the society's members who is acutely interested in the project is Matt Jardin, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center who is working on a research project to develop a Mars plane.
The Mars plane will be a robotic aircraft with a roughly 6-foot wingspan that can carry cameras or other scientific instruments to points of interest to researchers. It would travel to Mars as a collapsed package along with an orbiter or lander. The plane would parachute into the atmosphere, unfold as it was falling toward the ground, level itself, and fire its engine to begin flight.
A critical component of the Mars plane is its navigation and control system. Engineers must develop a reliable method for the plane to recover from a tumbling free fall, right itself and enter a controlled flight. This is one of the problems Jardin is working on at Ames.
"The first step is to stabilize the plane and figure out which way is down," Jardin said. "I'd want to verify that a plane coming out not knowing what orientation it was in could orient and stabilize itself."
Testing these systems may be possible with a scale model of the plane that could be deployed from the cadets' experimental rocket, Jardin said. The full-scale craft is designed to weigh about 22 pounds (10 kilograms), so a making a miniature to fit inside the payload area might be possible, especially if the model were a non-powered version of the plane -- a glider.
The preliminary designs for the cadets' rocket call for a body 15 feet tall that weighs 286 pounds (130 kilograms) when fully loaded with fuel and payload. The rocket will have room for a cylindrical payload 8 inches (20 centimeters) in diameter and a foot (30 centimeters) tall.
The experimental rocket program challenges the academy's astronautical engineering majors to build and test rocket engines each year. This year's group of seniors wasn't satisfied with the prospect that their creation would remain mounted on a horizontal test bed, never getting off the ground. The students decided to raise the aim of their project and launch a rocket into space, which means shooting it to a minimum altitude of 50 miles (80 kilometers).
The students want to prove they can deliver a payload into orbit, so that in future years the academy's experimental rocket program can launch cadet-built satellites, Gentile said.
"This is an experimental student project and we're not even sure it will make it up, so we just want to be very clear about that," he said. Having stated the disclaimer, though, Gentile said he and the rest of the group are confident. "We might just be foolish students but we think we can do it."
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