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
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