Zeppelins of Mars - HAVOC on Venus : NASA's new Planetary Airships

If you thought airships like the Zeppelin were a thing of a past and consigned to the history books for their dangerous ability to burst into flames and think again because NASA is looking at using the same principle to explore Mars and Venus. On March 21st 1999 a giant silver shape descended from the sky to thump down bounce and land in the Egyptian desert it was the giant balloon the Breitling Orbiter 3 and from the red capsule below emerged Bertrand Piccard grandson of Auguste Piccard the first man to reach for stratosphere and son of Jean Picard who in 1960 was the first to reach for challenger deep aboard the submersible Trieste, so the same family has achieved both the highest and the deepest records. With his co-pilot Brian Jones, Bertrand completed the ultimate balloon fligh t40,814 kilometers or 25,361 miles in less than twenty days to achieve that 20th century's last greatest circumnavigation. The Breitling Orbiter 3 traveled around the earth fueled by 28 cylinders containing 10,000 pounds of four and a half tonnes of propane. This endurance far exceeds four capabilities of a powered aircraft with the sole exception of the latest solar-powered airplanes. Airships were one of the first technologies to take humans into flight with the most well-known and infamous being the German Zeppelin's. They work according to an elementary principle of using a lighter than air envelope or balloon to lift a manned cabin or payload through the atmosphere. The basic physics of balloon flight remained the same today with the latest airship the British airlander 10 which is currently the longest aircraft in the world. On earth helium-filled balloons fly in the lower stratosphere between 10 kilometers and 33 kilometers or roughly 30,000 to 110,000 feet above sea level but Earth's atmosphere is quite different from our planetary neighbors. Venus is a crushing storm world and Mars has only a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide. But the simplicity, range and efficiency of airships makes them an attractive option for engineers designing planetary aero BOTS and manned vehicles. In 1984 a joint mission between the Soviet space agency IKI and a French Agency CNES launched two Vega probes on a journey to study Halley's Comet via an accelerating slingshot encounter with Venus. Here the probes were to release the first extraterrestrial weather balloons designed by French chief scientist Jacques Blamont on the Vega probes arrived Venus on the 11th and 15th of June 1985 and deployed the balloons on the planet's night side where they inflated to a diameter of approximately 12 feet or three and a half meters at an altitude of 50 kilometres of 31 miles. The balloons returned data every 75 seconds as they were blown by hurricane speed winds around one third of Venus's circumference in two days proving that light of an air probes can conduct wide-ranging surveys of even the most hostile atmospheres. Despite the success, Vega remains the only balloon probes to have ventured beyond the Earth's atmosphere or vote Jacques Blamont worked on a similar probe to visit Mars cuts in a Russian funding pushed the mission back and back until the project was eventually dropped. However at NASA's Langley Research Center, scientists are exploring the possibility of returning to Venus with airships the mission called the 'High Altitude Venus Operational Concept' or HAVOC, would use a helium-filled blimp just as the vega probes did. The 31 meter or 100-foot airship would deploy to hover above the clouds at around 90 kilometres of 300,000 feet above the Venusian surface powered by solar arrays from here it could provide support for Landers or return samples to earth. Eventually manned versions of HAVOC could provide support for a 30-day mission to our closest planetary neighbor. In the thin atmosphere of Mars airships could go even further as one of NASA's innovative advanced concepts a design for a vacuum airship has been approved for further research. Just as hydrogen or helium is less dense and therefore floats up in a denser atmosphere like on earth, a vacuum will do the same the problem on earth is but the air pressure will crush a vacuum balloon. Its structure would need to be very strong and therefore heavy, too heavy in fact for the vacuum to lift it. However on Mars with a much less dense atmosphere the structure would not require the same strength as here on earth and therefore would be much lighter to allow the buoyancy of a vacuum to work. According to the principle a rigid body balloon could carry double the payload of a gas filled airship and would pump air in and out of the envelope to maintain and control the degree of vacuum and therefore lift. The vacuum airship would have a large surface area for solar panels which high above a Martian storms would also avoid many of the usual issues of dust and sand buildup. Although it would be the largest man-made object in space other than the ISS, a vacuum airship could be extremely maneuverable using a method known as CG or center of gravity vectoring the fore and aft sections of the aircraft could use different levels of vacuum to move vertically and navigate extreme terrain such as canyons and cliffs like the brightening orbiter under Vega balloons Aero Bots on Mars could cover vast distances catching a free ride on the planetary weather systems. Navigating these winds the NASA vacuum airship could lift ground-based Rovers and transport them to other locations. Robotic labs including Curiosity and NASA's 2020 Rover are designed to cover less than a few hundred meters per day, these could be lifted to other interesting locations on the surface and with the need to an increasing amount of hardware around in preparation for the main missions of 2030s reusable airships on Mars might be our best option to do this heavy lifting. So thanks for watching and I just like to say that this episode shirt was the Penny dot Lane in black and grey by Madcap England and is available from Adamretro.com with worldwide shipping from here in the UK we also have the curious droid Facebook page feed link is in the channel page and I'd like to thank all our patrons for ongoing support and if you would like to support us then please visit the patreon page including showing so as always thanks for watching and please subscribe rate and share.

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 306,906

Rating: 4.9530039 out of 5

Keywords: havoc, airship, mars airships, martian airships, venus airships, vacuum airship, zeppelin, Zeppelins of Mars, HAVOC on Venus, nasa, paul shillito, andy munzer, mars, venus, space, curious-droid.com, curious droid, madcap england, atomretro.com, vega probe, High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, rigid-bodied balloon, Breitling Orbiter, 2020 rover, curiosity rover, Bertrand Piccard, August Piccard, Jacques Piccard, Brian Jones, circumnavigation

Id: -oG7aclzD3o

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2017