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Airships seem somewhat vulnerable to the weather, in practice, as they're always flying. A nice thing about a helicopter is you can land, and it's a station unt

Airships seem somewhat vulnerable to the weather, in practice, as they're always flying. A nice thing about a helicopter is you can land, and it's a station until you take off again.

mikepurvis 5y ago
I don't think we know too much at this point about how Ingenuity will survive dust storms— I see a reddit thread on this but not much else: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lo6k73/what_will_happen_to_the_ingenuity_helicopter_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lo6k73/what_will_hap... If there was a dedicated mission for a much larger helicopter, it would obviously be important for it to have a story for weathering these things.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Dust storms on Mars aren't dust storms on Earth - we're not really talking damaging winds due to the low pressure. Moreover, since Ingenuity does fly, and blow air around, it's going to have a much better chance of cleaning it's own solar panels.
dogma1138 5y ago
The weather isn’t that of an issue due to the thin atmosphere. You can land an airship by compressing the lifting gas into a liquid. If you can get enough power reserve at least to do that. The main issue would be the size of the balloon but honestly if we can make some origami rigid airframe a vacuum airship might actually work. At that point controlling buoyancy is also less of an issue from a power perspective since you don’t need a large power reserve to land, and when you are on the ground you can wait until you have enough power to create sufficient vacuum in the airship.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  In general trying to create a vacuum airship is a loosing game because you have to add so much support to prevent it from collapsing that you can't win the race between volume and weight to achieve buoyancy. The thinner atmosphere is a bonus to decreasing the force for a given volume but you simultaneously have to increase the size of the 'balloon' since it's displacing less air for every unit of volume so it has to get bigger which increases the surface area further. Doing some quick math using the ideal shape of a sphere: Mars surface atmosphere is ~1/60th as dense as the Earth's so you'll wind up with 23x the surface area which at the reduced surface pressures of mars you'd be looking at around 15% of the total forces you'd have to resist. For a sphere that might just push it into the realm of possible options but to get to a 'pure' vacuum you need very fancy and heavy pumps that need cryogenic cooling beyond the difficulty of doing this with an actual blimp shape.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    I think I missed a couple things in my initial calculations, like the reduced gravity of Mars, so the number is ~5%. Idk if that brings it back into the realm of possibility though. Even given the ability to make it you'd likely have issues with the process of getting it there if we're not assembling it in situ.

Airships seem somewhat vulnerable to the weather, in practice, as they're always flying. A nice thing about a helicopter is you can land, and it's a station until you take off again.

mikepurvis 5y ago

I don't think we know too much at this point about how Ingenuity will survive dust storms— I see a reddit thread on this but not much else: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lo6k73/what_will_happen_to_the_ingenuity_helicopter_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lo6k73/what_will_hap... If there was a dedicated mission for a much larger helicopter, it would obviously be important for it to have a story for weathering these things.

XorNot 5y ago
Dust storms on Mars aren't dust storms on Earth - we're not really talking damaging winds due to the low pressure. Moreover, since Ingenuity does fly, and blow air around, it's going to have a much better chance of cleaning it's own solar panels.

dogma1138 5y ago

The weather isn’t that of an issue due to the thin atmosphere. You can land an airship by compressing the lifting gas into a liquid. If you can get enough power reserve at least to do that. The main issue would be the size of the balloon but honestly if we can make some origami rigid airframe a vacuum airship might actually work. At that point controlling buoyancy is also less of an issue from a power perspective since you don’t need a large power reserve to land, and when you are on the ground you can wait until you have enough power to create sufficient vacuum in the airship.

rtkwe 5y ago
In general trying to create a vacuum airship is a loosing game because you have to add so much support to prevent it from collapsing that you can't win the race between volume and weight to achieve buoyancy. The thinner atmosphere is a bonus to decreasing the force for a given volume but you simultaneously have to increase the size of the 'balloon' since it's displacing less air for every unit of volume so it has to get bigger which increases the surface area further. Doing some quick math using the ideal shape of a sphere: Mars surface atmosphere is ~1/60th as dense as the Earth's so you'll wind up with 23x the surface area which at the reduced surface pressures of mars you'd be looking at around 15% of the total forces you'd have to resist. For a sphere that might just push it into the realm of possible options but to get to a 'pure' vacuum you need very fancy and heavy pumps that need cryogenic cooling beyond the difficulty of doing this with an actual blimp shape.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  I think I missed a couple things in my initial calculations, like the reduced gravity of Mars, so the number is ~5%. Idk if that brings it back into the realm of possibility though. Even given the ability to make it you'd likely have issues with the process of getting it there if we're not assembling it in situ.