Gizmorama - July 6, 2015

Good Morning,

Ready to fly the Martian skies? NASA researchers are preparing to test the first Martian airplane. Just imagine what first class ticket will set you back.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Prandtl-m prototype could pave way for first plane on Mars --*
WASHINGTON (UPI) - NASA researchers are preparing to test the prototype that may pave the way for the first plane to fly Martian skies. The airplane is called the Prandtl-m.

The plane was first designed and developed by engineering students working at the space agency as part of an internship program in 2012 and 2013. That model was called the Prandtl-d.

Scientists at NASA have decided to tweak the design and switch the 'd' to an 'm'. The new prototype is set for test flights later this year. The radio-controlled glider will be lifted to an elevation of 100,000 feet via high-altitude balloon and then released to begin its maiden flight. The upper atmosphere will mimic the thin Martian air.

The plane is collapsible; its foldable wings allow it to be fitted snugly into a stack of three CubeSats, or a 3U CubeSat. CubeSats are the uniform (and affordable) miniature satellites used by NASA and others for a variety of orbital experiments.

While the plane will be lifted in its fully deployed form on the first test, subsequent flights will have the prototype emerge from the mini space probe.

"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 chief scientist and Prandtl-m program manager, said in a press release. "It would be able to deploy and fly in the Martian atmosphere and glide down and land. The Prandtl-m could overfly some of the proposed landing sites for a future astronaut mission and send back to Earth very detailed high resolution photographic map images that could tell scientists about the suitability of those landing sites."

But before the first of the three test flights, the design has to be finalized.

"We have a number of summer community college students coming that are going to help us design and build the aircraft that will complete the first phase of the mission," Bowers said. "We're going to build some vehicles and we are going to put them in very unusual attitudes and see if they will recover where other aircraft would not."

"Our expectation is that they will recover," he continued. "As soon as we get that information, we will feel much better flying it from a high-altitude balloon."

If all goes well on the first couple missions, the plane might be launched into space via rocket and released for a dramatic re-entry flight.

"That mission could be to 450,000 feet and the release from a CubeSat at apogee," Bowser said. "The aircraft would fall back into the Earth's atmosphere and as it approaches the 110,000-to-115,000-feet altitude range, the glider would deploy just as though it was over the surface of Mars."

If the prototype executes the descent with precision, researchers will likely ask NASA headquarters to take Prandtl-m along on the next rover mission to Mars.


*-- Scientists are watching the birth of a planet --*
ZURICH, Switzerland (UPI) - A team of astronomers in Switzerland have discovered a young gas giant still in the early stages of formation. The planet remains embedded in the accretion disc of its parent star.

The discovery, made with the help of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, offers scientists the chance to observe planetary formation as it happens -- a first.

The gas planet orbits a neighboring star called HD 100546, which lies some 335 light-years away. Scientists say the protoplanet is likely similar to our own solar system's Jupiter.

Because the young planet is located near the outer edge of its sun's circumstellar disk, there remains the possibility that it is an older planet that has been flung outward. But the chances of an older planet being expelled on a trajectory perfectly in line with accretion disc is are slim, researchers say.

"It's a scenario we still can't rule out completely," lead researcher Sascha Quanz, an astronomer at ETH Zurich, said in press release. "But it's much less likely than our explanation, which suggests that what we're seeing is the birth of a planet."

Quanz's team says an older star would have likely cleared out more of an orbital path, but the planet circling HD 100546 is still closely wrapped in gas, dust and debris.

The discovery, detailed in the Astrophysical Journal, offers scientists a real life laboratory in which to watch the evolution of a gas giant.

"It provides us with unique observational data on what happens when a gas giant is formed," Quanz said -- as opposed to simply relying on computer models. "Now we have a kind of 'laboratory' that can give us empirical data."

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