What do you call an aircraft that isn't flying through...air?

USMCmech said:
Yes, Mars has an atmosphere. It's mostly CO2 and about 5% of earths density.
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Well, I was just making a smarty-pants comment about Earth air on Mars. :smoke: But, exercising my google-foo found the following—

The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to the density found 35 km above the Earth’s surface. The resulting mean surface pressure is only 0.6% of that of the Earth (101.3 kPa).
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You don't see many helicopters at 115,000 ft.
 
fholbert said:
JPL is scheduled to fly a helicopter on Mars in April.
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www.jpl.nasa.gov

Ingenuity

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was a small, autonomous aircraft. It was sent to Mars to perform experimental flight tests to determine if powered, controlled flight at the Red Planet was possible.
www.jpl.nasa.gov www.jpl.nasa.gov

I found the 360 view fascinating. It appears to use collective pitch control of the blades. Even for 4 lbs, I figured the blades would be longer. In comparison an Earthly 1 oz toy coaxial has a rotor disc that’s only 1/3rd of this one. Then again, it’s only using RPM to control lift.
 
Small blades spinning really really fast.

Incidentally, the helicopter was built by a company my dad used to work for, AeroVironment. They developed, among other things, the Gossamer Albatross and Gossamer Condor, the first human-powered aircraft, and the first solar aircraft to stay aloft for a month(?) I think.
 
Roger Roger said:
Costs nothing if you don’t pay the bill.
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Did he not pay? Didn’t read the article. When I see his planes just takes me back to my regional days flying out of LGA. And now I still hate flying out of there. I hate getting a word in with ground there!
 
Derg said:
Air is classically defined as the gases in the earths atmosphere, which is as idiotic as us naming our moon, “Moon” when a moon isn’t unique to Earth. Kind of like naming our planet, “Planet”,

But our language is derived from the pre-Heliocentric days.

“Copernicus! Ammo whip yo ass after mass!” said the Pope.
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I guess at some point the definition of “air” is going to have to change. When Elon Musk’s next clone founds Marsopolis, will there be airplanes, or something else? This of course assumes airplanes even will be practica...
 
invadertim said:
I guess at some point the definition of “air” is going to have to change. When Elon Musk’s next clone founds Marsopolis, will there be airplanes, or something else? This of course assumes airplanes even will be practica...
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Atmospheric Vehicles. I think even “The Expanse” book series refers to airplanes as these.

We should start with “The Moon” though. But even then, it’ll be a generation of idiots bellyaching about “Now they wanna cancel the moon! I CANT HANDLE THIS!!”.

But, of course, in DougVille, science would be a thing, we’d all be metric and there’d be fewer F-35’s and more funding for NASA.
 
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