Student Project : CSUN Gets Grant to Design Aircraft for Scouting Mars

Cal State Northridge students have received a $105,000 grant to design a lightweight unmanned aircraft to scout Mars, looking for potential landing sites for a manned mission to the planet.

The grant was awarded by the Universities Space Research Assn., a foundation sponsoring National Aeronautics and Space Administration-endorsed research at 43 universities across the country. When the designs are complete, NASA designers review them to determine if they are worthy of further development, said Prof. Tim Fox, chairman of the mechanical engineering department of CSUN’s School of Engineering and Computer Science.

“We will come up with a design for an aircraft to fly in the Martian atmosphere and explore the planet surface,” Fox said. “It will be totally up to NASA as to what they want to do with it.”

The foundation’s student research program was initiated several years ago to allow NASA to stimulate and tap innovations in space research by university students, said Nancy Wood, special assistant to the foundation’s president. Each project focuses on a specific problem under investigation by NASA scientists.

NASA scientists hope to send human explorers to Mars in the second decade of the coming century. But they still have insufficient knowledge of the planet’s geography. Only a tiny portion of the planet has been closely photographed. The remainder has been viewed only from a great distance, providing few details of its topography, said John Alred, a former NASA long-range planner who now works with the foundation.

An “autonomous flying rover”--which scientists expect will be a winged craft similar to a light airplane, but with larger wings to cope with the thin Martian atmosphere--could take close-up pictures of the planet’s surface, enabling scientists to map the planet’s mountains, canyons and valleys, he said.

This information could be used to map paths for land rovers, being developed by two aerospace firms, which NASA scientists plan to send to Mars in 1996 to wander the planet collecting soil samples, Alred said.

Fox also suggested that the flying rovers could replace the unmanned ground vehicle mission.

“This can be an alternative to a land rover. The advantage is that you are not subjected to the hazards of the terrain. The land rover is going to have a limited range and be subject to more hazards during its traverse. The flying rover would be more for detail mapping of the surface, taking a close look at all the potential sites for landings,” Fox said.

Fox will oversee a group of about 30 mechanical engineering undergraduates as they grapple with the technical questions that must be solved before a flying rover is built.

“One possibility is to launch the aircraft from a lander already on the surface; the other is to drop it into the atmosphere from a rocket in orbit. These are all things that will be decided,” he said.

The project will be conducted over three years under the guidance of NASA designers. The money will be used to pay for materials, stipends for graduate teaching assistants and travel expenses so the students can attend NASA design conferences, Fox said.

He said he hopes his students’ ideas will eventually be incorporated into the space program.

“We’d like to think this design will be technically feasible,” he said.