A book giveaway by the Chronicle’s science blogger — Eric Berger — got me thinking about what it would take to fly an ultralight on Mars. I even traded a few barbs with a fellow contestant — ttyler5 — which got me thinking even more. So, I did what any healthy, Internet-connected 21st Century guy would do… I Googled it.
Now, my figures are all extrapolations of information I got off the NASA site, so there might be other factors at work, but regardless of their accuracy, it’s been fun to think about it.
According to NASA, a 24kg/53lb aircraft with a 2 meter/6.56 feet wing span would need to fly about 250mph to stay aloft. A legal UL, with a typical American aboard, would weigh about 206kgs/454lbs, so extrapolating the wing span would put it at about 17 meters/56 feet. Most ultralight aircraft here on Earth have wingspans of about 30 feet or so. With a wingspan almost double, then the wing would have to be pretty stiff… not so much because of gravity — it would be much less — but because of any buffeting from the atmosphere… and simply to hold itself up. There’s also the question about what modifications would be needed to make the airfoil efficient.
Glossing over the nitty gritty details, this seems almost doable. The other issue, however, would be the power plant that would propel it to 250mph. Ignore for the moment that there might not be enough oxygen around to ignite an internal combustion engine, the other factor is the weight of the engine, the bracing it would have to have for the aircraft to support it, and what kind of crazy propeller is going to bite into an atmosphere that is only 1% of what it’s like here on Earth?
Another thought was, landing it will require a much, much longer runway. I’d bet any kind of bounce would be awesome to watch.
Needless to say, flying an ultralight on Mars would be a complex undertaking, and way more expensive than my little hobby… NASA had budgeted $100 million for a Mars Plane, I think, but I’d bet a lot of that would have gone into an exotic engine for it.