Chinese scientists eye hypersonic drone flight on Mars

Space aircraft may still be 30 years away but would solve the issue of long-distance travel on the red planet, says school of astronautics professor

By 2035, China plans to build a hypersonic aircraft to fly anywhere on Earth within an hour and hopes in 2045 to have a fleet of space planes

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Nasa’s Ingenuity helicopter is viewed by the Perseverance rover’s rear Hazard Camera on April 4, 2021. A hypersonic drone proposed by Chinese scientists would use magnesium as fuel. Photo: Nasa

Published: 11:00pm, 14 Sep 2021

Chinese space scientists have come up with a proposal for hypersonic flight across the surface of Mars which, if successful, they say would solve another piece of the red planet colonisation puzzle.

Nasa’s Ingenuity helicopter can fly a distance of more than 600 metres (1,970 feet) even though Mars, with an atmosphere 100 times thinner than that on Earth, is not suited to helicopter blades.

However, a hypersonic aircraft is built to fly in thin air.

A 500kg (1,100-pound) drone, with fuel making up about half its weight, could zip over the Martian terrain at five times the speed of sound for 1,000km (621 miles), according to calculations by Professor Xu Xu and colleagues at the school of astronautics at Beihang University in Beijing.

“A hypersonic flight on Mars will not be as easy as here on Earth, generally speaking. But there is some good news,” Xu told the South China Morning Post on Monday.

The gravity on Mars is about a third of Earth’s gravity. Lower air density also means less heat is produced by turbulence given the same altitude.

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