A future spacecraft headed to Mars may have a specialized NASA drone made for the Red Planet.
A new plan by NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center would put a Mars drone to work in its atmosphere sometime between 2022 and 2024.
“The aircraft would be part of the ballast that would be ejected from the aeroshell that takes the Mars rover to the planet,” Al Bowers, NASA Armstrong’s chief scientist, said in a news release, NBC News reported Wednesday. “It would be able to deploy and fly in the Martian atmosphere, and glide down and land.”
The space agency is trying to ready a prototype of the Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars, or Prandtl-m, for later this year.
If the Prandtl-m makes it to Mars, then Mr. Bowers expects it to be able to fly for roughly 10 minutes. It would take off from an altitude of 110,000 to 115,000 feet.
“The aircraft would be gliding for the last 2,000 feet to the surface of Mars and have a range of about 20 miles,” Mr. Bowers said in NASA’s statement. The drone would send high-resolution images from its flight back to earth.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.