Princeton Weekly Bulletin March 1, 1999
Mars flight to mark Wright brothers' centennial
NASA has agreed to fund a project that will culminate in a flight of an airplane in the atmosphere of Mars on December 17, 2003, exactly 100 years after the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
The idea was first proposed by Edgar Choueiri, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, in a May 1997 document he circulated among his department and some outside colleagues. Choueiri's idea was to commemorate the centennial of Orville and Wilbur Wright's first powered flight by flying an airplane in the Martian atmosphere around December 2003. He called for a collaborative effort involving NASA, industry and academe.
While NASA had previously considered the idea of flying a plane on Mars, the Princeton proposal to link such a flight to the Wright flight centennial gave a framework, a timeframe and a motive for such a mission. "This is going to be an incredible achievement," said NASA's head administrator Daniel Goldin.
Though the driving objective, said Choueiri, is to commemorate the centennial of one of the most momentous technological achievements in human history, such a challenging and ambitious mission would be replete with concrete benefits of scientific, technological, educational and even historical value. The motivation for pursuing this endeavor, he explained, stems from its capability to generate direct and spin-off benefits.
"Aresplane," not "airplane"
Since the Martian atmosphere is devoid of air (it is mostly carbon dioxide), the term "airplane" is not very suitable, Choueiri said. Instead, he calls the craft an "Aresplane," referring to Ares, the Greek name for the god Mars. The challenge of flying the Aresplane stems from the fact that the Martian atmosphere is more than 100 to 150 times thinner than that of Earth at sea level. This problem is only a little alleviated by the fact that gravity on Mars is about 2.6 times less that on Earth.
The project will force researchers to seek solutions for problems related to materials, airfoil design, dynamics and control, and propulsion, which corres-pond to research areas in which the MAE department has made numerous contributions, Choueiri notes, and a few MAE professors have been discussing technical aspects of the mission since the idea was put forward in 1997. Aside from advances in related technologies, the project could lead to a better understanding of geological processes that shaped the red planet and its vast canyons. Scientific instruments on the Aresplane could examine the planet's surface with a resolution far exceeding that of orbiting spacecraft.
The Princeton proposal noted that this would be the first time an airplane is flown outside our planet, and as such it would be a literally horizon-widening tribute to a century of flight, as well as a resonating statement on the continuing vitality and importance of flight to human evolution.