Soaring on a terraformed Mars - winter diversions

On Sun, 25 Jan 2004 15:21:44 -0700, "Bill Daniels"
wrote:

Thinking about a theoretical terraformed Mars make you realize just how much
everything we know about terrestrial aerodynamics and weather depends on the
ICAO standard atmosphere. I guess the first step is to figure out what the
terraformed Mars equivalent of that would be.

It's interesting to think of a 15 meter glider in 1/3 gravity. At 1000 mb
the Reynolds numbers would be the same but the flying weight would be
reduced by 2/3rds. You might want to carry a LOT of ballast.

I suspect you'd need to bring the wing loading up to something like
current practise in order to get into the same Re number regime we're
used to. You could either add lots of ballast (200 kg or so) or reduce
the wing area. If you did the latter at current weights you'd end up
with 3 - 3.5 sq. m of wing. Consider also that the chord should not
be reduced by much, because that reduces Re, so you'd end up with a 5
- 6m wing. The roll rate should be spectacular!

The Mars year is 687 Earth days so it would be a really long soaring season.

The sun is weaker (about 52% of Earthly incident solar radiation) due
to Mars' 37% greater distance from the sun, so the thermals would be
quite a lot weaker, possibly starting later and stopping earlier in
the day. Does anybody on this 'ere ng know anything about when dust
devils are active during the Martian day?

And, sadly, the non-soaring season would also be rather long. OTOH it
wouldn't be so nearly far to tow our trailers to go to the Martian
Antipodes for winter.

--
martin@ : Martin Gregorie
gregorie : Harlow, UK
demon :
co : Zappa fan & glider pilot
uk :