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NASA Scraps Mars Airplane Flight in 2003
By Andrew Bridges
Chief Pasadena Correspondent
posted: 05:54 am ET
09 November 1999
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NASA Scraps Mars Airplane Flight in 2003PASADENA -- NASA has scrapped plans to fly an airplane on Mars on Dec. 17, 2003 -- the 100th anniversary to the day of the Wright brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. "We're not going to be able to do it in '03 because we are unable to match the resources with the cost of the mission," said Doug Isbell, a NASA spokesman. The Mars Airplane -- which would cost an estimated $100 million -- could still, however, be part of a planned 2005 mission, Isbell said. According to a NASA request for proposals issued September 7 -- the plane was to have achieved "controlled, powered and level flight, and transmit engineering and science data." The target date for the brief mission was to have commemorated the anniversary of Orville and Wilbur Wright's first powered flight on December 17, 1903. The Mars Airplane flight would mark the first time a winged vehicle of any sort has flown on another planetary body. Scientists hope an airplane could provide a new way of exploring another planet in ways an orbiter, a rover or a lander could not. One proposal was to fly the plane through the Vallis Marineris, a martian canyon 2,400 miles long and more than five miles deep. Such a flight would give scientists a close-up, albeit fleeting, view of the canyon's walls, which record possibly millions of years of geological history in their myriad layers. Flying on Mars is no mean feat, though. Its atmosphere is only one percent as dense as the Earth's. Such conditions put an aircraft's wings to the test when it comes to generating lift. The plane would have been the first of series of planned Mars Micromissions, a new class of missions NASA hopes to repeat every two years. The plane would have been launched in 2002 aboard a French Ariane 5 rocket. Isbell said the money for the airplane would likely be re-budgeted toward development of new Mars telecommunications satellites, like the recently lost Mars Climate Orbiter -- only smaller.
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