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Space Science

Automatically Inflating Martian Balloon 39

Posted by Hemos from the mars-needs-omwen dept.
Phrogman writes "SpaceRef has exclusive coverage of a new method of automatically inflating a balloon in the Martian atmosphere to permit probes to help explore the planet. These balloons using a newly discovered technique to automatically inflate based on a combination of a volatile liquid stored in the balloon itself and the atmospheric pressure on Mars. This appaarently was previously impossible. There is a much better description of the technique in the article, plus a 60 second video (in Real format) of a test inflation in Earth's Atmosphere conducted at 100,000 feet (a similiar atmospheric pressure to that of Mars). Very interesting stuff that might offer Nasa some better options for really exploring Mars."
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Automatically Inflating Martian Balloon More

Automatically Inflating Martian Balloon

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  • What I would like to see happen is another country or company step up to the call of tring to go to Mars. This will help create some competion so NASA will come up with more great ideas like this one. I would like to to another great space race.
  • These balloons using a newly discovered technique to automatically inflate based on a combination of a volatile liquid stored in the balloon itself and the atmospheric pressure on Mars. This was previously impossible apparently.

    Man, don't you just hate it when NASA screws with the laws of Physics?

    --
    while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
    hack (reality);

  • Former NASA engineer... (Score:4)

    by Dr Caleb ( 121505 ) on Thursday August 31, 2000 @08:57PM (#812413) Homepage Journal
    A man walks into a Silicon Valley pet shop to buy a monkey. The store owner shows him three monkeys and explains, "The one on the left costs five hundred dollars." "Why so much?" the customer wants to know.

    "Because," the shopkeeper explains, "he can do computer programming in C."

    "What about that monkey?" the man asks indicating the next animal. "He costs fifteen hundred dollars because he knows how to program in Visual C++ and Object-Relational technology."

    The startled patron then inquires about the third monkey. "He's worth three thousand dollars," the store owner replies. "Three thousand dollars!" The man exclaims. "What can he do?"

    "To be honest," the merchant confesses, "I've never seen him do a thing, but he says he used to work for NASA."

  • what are you talking about. the mars pathfinder mission in 97 that used a parachute then a ballon to bounce land worked fantastically. the mars polar lander last year used conventional rocket firings and parachutes to slow down.....supposedly anyway.

  • Ballons have already been to other planets. (Score:3)

    by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Thursday August 31, 2000 @09:13PM (#812415)
    In 1985 the Soviet Union's "Vega 1" probe, while on it's way to Halley's comet flew past Venus and dropped off a Venera style lander and a balloon to investigate the Venusian middle cloud layer. The balloon floated in the atmosphere for about 48 hours at an altitude of 54 km. they repeated the trick with Vega 2 only 4 days later. of course they weren't passively inflated with the evaporation of a volatile liquid like the one in the article, if I remember correctly I think they had to take along their own pressurized tanks.
  • Helium's an inert gas. You'd have to be a pretty strange creature to get any buzz off of it. (other than oxygen starvation--or starvation of whatever's your gas of choice... but if hte Martian's got high off of holding their breath, thay'd be dead.)

    Shit! THAT's what happened to the dinosaurs!

  • http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/aerobot/studies/vega_ detail.html

    chock full o' detail!!
  • Great, now we have self inflating Martian atmospheric research probes. Of all the geeks ever seen on /. these guys REALLY need girlfriends. I wonder if the cameras will have blue tinted peripheral vision (viagra). These guys could have made a round balloon but chose a sausage shape instead.
  • I wonder how they are planning to control the altitude. There needs to be a way to make sure this thing isn't too high up when it crosses from daylight into nighttime. Otherwise the internal gas would condense, causing the balloon to decend rapidly (i.e. crash).

    Two ideas came to mind: (1) instead of a single internal fluid, use a blend of of internal fluids, with a range of boiling points, so the transition from bouyant to non-bouyant is more gradual, and (2) use a highly heat absorbant surface on the top of the balloon (so it rises a lot when the sun is high in the sky) and a less heat absorbant surface on the sides of the balloon (so it starts to decend as the sun gets closer to the horizion).

  • Re:One fatal flaw (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Substances don't need to be reactive in order to have neurological effects. Several noble gases cause narcosis in humans, probably because they have just the right size to fit into the pocket of some enzyme and block it.

  • Re:One fatal flaw (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Helium can cause brain cancer from excessive inhalation. I don't have the JAMA sites with me right now, but helium isn't as safe as you might think.

  • mars too! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31, 2000 @10:12PM (#812422)
    This self-inflating balloon test experiment was actually the product of a company called Pioneer Astronautics, which was merely funded by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NOT NASA.

    In fact, the head of the experiment was a Dr. Robert Zubrin, whom has spearheaded a humans-to-Mars program for the past 10 years, which has gotten a lot of folks down at NASA excited.

    Anyone who is interested should check out these sites:

    http://www.marssociety.org
    http://www.marshabitat.com/
  • Funny, but I bet the shape was selected for a different reason: the ratio of surface area to volume.

    A sphere has less surface area for the same volume than a cylinder has. Since they rely on solar heating, they need a shape with more surface area.
  • Cool! It is the new meaning of impossible. Now it mean "NASA does not know how to do it". Look at this paper [reciprocality.org] and this paper [deoxy.org] to learn more about such thinking bug. These papers worth reading.

  • actually... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The balloon was inflated by solar heating at 100,000 ft up with atmospheric pressure just 1% of normal (10 millibar of pressure), and the temperature was -50 Celsius.

    Once the balloon inflates, it's not coming down unless the balloon heads to the poles, by which time its mission would likely be over.

    However, I have heard of development of solar super-balloons which would use more conventional gases to inflate them. The catch? The balloons would never leak any gas, so they would stay up indefinitely-allowing a detailed survey of Mars for months at a time from an altitude of only a few kilometers.
  • In the video clip, the newly inflated balloon hangs underneath the carrier balloon. Shouldn't that balloon be floating instead of hanging?
  • All right, so it was badly worded. (I'd say so sue me, but who knows someone might...) I should have said something like "previously this required a much less cost effective solution involving pressurized gases to inflate the balloon, now apparently it can be done with a much more easily transported unpressurized liquid which changes to a gas under the conditions in the Martian atmosphere". You get that into a 5 word sentance if you can.
  • ..... This was previously thought impossible.
  • Dear NASA,

    This is to inform you that my client, Black Parrot, holds the patent on one-click balloon inflation.

    --
  • Hehe... I've been getting pointed to reciprocality.org left and right this week... after reading the 1st chapter of the Programmer's Stone, I'm convinced that this stuff ought to be required reading!

    --
    while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
    hack (reality);
  • SpaceDev [spacedev.com] claim to have developed a standard Mars microprobe architecture that they will sell for about $24 million. NASA is apparently looking at it for their proposed Mars Network, a combined GPS (APS=AreoPositioning System?) and communications network. It could also be used to place 2-3 small landers/balloons/etc into Mars' atmosphere. The design is meant to be launched as a secondary payload on launchers such as Ariane 5, and use Earth/Moon gravity assists and Mars aerobraking to get it there. Spacedev will sell it to any interested party, and CEO Jim Benson said "You say things aren't happening fast enough with NASA's current Mars Exploration Program. Then decide what you want to send to Mars, get a sponsor, and just do it! Inner planet missions like this one can now be done for about the cost of a private jet or mega-yacht" How about it, Mr Gates?
  • Looks like someone at NASA discovered what happens when you fill a balloon with baking soda and vinegar...

    Kevin Fox
  • Why? Is it someones birthday?
  • Wat it means, is that balloons become simpler and easier. You can now imagine a lander carrying half a dozen balloons with 1kg payloads that get released one by one. One problem with baloons though is tracking, for good science data, you need to know what the readings are and where they where taken. Until something like Marsnet [nasa.gov] is up and running, the full potential of balloons won't be fulfilled

  • I think the point of the experiment was to sho that the baloon can inflate in temperture/pressure approximating those on Mars, not to actually fly the dam thing!


  • ...after all these many months of simply sucking.

  • I guess you'd have to qualify "excessive". Divers have been breathing "relatively high" helium mixtures for years and I have not read anything about brain cancer produced by it.
  • In Zubrin's Book, "The Case for Mars", I believe he suggests mounting video cameras on the balloon probes. A hi-res one to take useful pictures, and a lower-res one to take "navigational shots" which could be matched against previous photos taken from orbit.

    Of course, the matching could be done rapidly by computer, then checked by people. With the knowledge of where the balloon was launched, you could narrow down the search area too. Then each "fix" would allow extrapolation of where the next photos come from, and so on.

    This system, of course, is part of Zubrin's "Mars Direct" philosophy which claims that Lunar bases and other $$$ things are not prerequisites for a crewed Mars mission. He would probably include a "Martian GPS" like Marsnet [nasa.gov] in his "unneccessary" list.

  • It seems this technique requires the sun to heat the bag to cause the liquid to boil. Would this technique work at Mars which is further away from the sun? I realize they tested the balloon in similar temperature conditions (-50C), but how do you test for less solar energy? Make half the balloon white?

  • Isn't that the same technology they use for the English, draft-in-a-can things? You know, Boddington's, Caffrey's, Guiness, etc?
  • Whats interesting is that this would also work on Venus, just fill the baloon with water, and as it drops below the point where water boils, the baloon expands lifting it back to where the water recondenses back down. Done right, and with enough baloons, this could actually cool venus down, at least to the point where the temperature is no longer above boiling.

  • I work at NASA Godard spaceflight center, where alot of testing like this is done, we actually can control all of the environmental conditions a spacecraft is likely to encounter (except zero G of course) What i suspect was done is that they put the baloon in a completely dark chamber, lowered the temperature, then shone a light on it with the same intensity as average martian sunlight. This was all done in an isolated chamber im sure at martian atmospheric pressure and composition as well. Its not like they took it to antarctica and released it to check to make sure it would work, although it is plausible that they could have done this additionally, but not as their sole testing.

  • How about... "Previously prohibitively expensive."
  • Done right, and with enough baloons, this could actually cool venus down, at least to the point where the temperature is no longer above boiling.

    Um....no. First of all, the high surface temperature of Venus is maintained by a pronounced greenhouse efect...the energy leaking through the clouds is equal to the energy it receives from the Sun. If you were to lower the total heat energy of Venus by chucking water balloons at it, less energy would leak out through the cloud cover until the system again hit equilibrium. (Actually, the planet would wind up hotter than before, since you've added water vapor, which is in itself a greenhouse gas.)

    Secondly, how do you plan on delivering these water balloons to Venus? There is the problem of kinetic energy to consider...objects hitting a planet from orbit tend to have a lot of velocity and attendant kinetic energy, which probably will offset any temporary gains from the addition of liquid water to the Venusian atmosphere.

    Third, just how much water do you plan on using? Earth has plenty, but we're sorta using it at the moment.

  • I do suspect the guy was being sarcastic ... unless, of course, the /. clientele isn't what it used to be. Or am I the victim of some incredibly subtle witticism myself?
  • Such as better air bags or something?

    Of course, if they _are_ designed for Mars' atmospheric pressure...

    "This is the new Chrysler Deimos, with top of the line, new NASA-approved self-inflating airbags. Be the first to own a Deimos! The car of the new millenium!"

    And with a faster, quieter voice: "Restrictions apply. Car must mantain an inner atmospheric pressure equal or lower that one standard Martian atmoshpere. Breathing apparatus for the driver and passengers not included. Your mileage may vary".

  • They released the balloon at 100,000 feet.

    At least that was what the article claimed.

  • If mars' atmosphere is like earth's at 100,000 feet - ummm, that's pretty thin. And is that mars' pressure at its surface or at a considerable altitude? My point is they're going to need a fairly huge balloon. Then again gravity on mars is less, or so I've heard.

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