Titan-Air

[Xylo]

Nothing paranormal about this, I just thought it was an interesting article about designing planes to fly around Saturn's moon Titan and Mars.

http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Titan-Air-.html

 

[Kandinsky]

Thanks for posting this.

It's always good to read articles that capture the brilliant visions of science. Maybe his ideas of a Titan aircraft won't be realised, but his design ideas could influence others. On the first page, my attention was caught by this...

Never mind that it rains methane there, and is so cold that water turns hard as granite. Titan’s atmosphere is thick—four times as dense as Earth’s—and the pull of gravity is only one-seventh what it is here. That combination makes it ideal for generating aerodynamic lift, so flying on Titan takes far less power than a comparable flight on Earth.

I know some members can visualise this scenario, but it's too much for me! As far as my mind can accommodate the idea, is it like moving through an atmosphere that has a similar resistance to moving through water on Earth? Not as dense as water, but much denser than air...a middle ground?

But for this Discovery round, he is part of a team proposing a different concept. Called TIME, for Titan Mare Explorer, it would land a floating spacecraft on one of the moon’s methane lakes. Lorenz thinks an airplane may well be included on some future multibillion-dollar expedition to Titan, but figures NASA might be nervous gambling an entire Discovery mission on its first extraterrestrial airplane—which some people still consider a pretty far-out concept.

Titan's up there with Europa and Mars for possibly harbouring life...let's hope some of these ideas play a part in finding out.

 

[Xylo]

I think it's interesting in that we can take what we have learned from the physics of flight on earth and apply that into design whilst changing the variables of gravity and atmosphere density.

Who knows if it will work, but the applied science, in my opinion, is amazing.