However, if that does get dull, there will also be VR headsets and high-speed wireless internet access available for live streaming back to Earth. That means about 16 sunrises and sunsets in every 24-hour period. They’re unlikely to get bored Aurora Station will sit in a low-Earth orbit 200 miles above the Earth’s surface, traveling around the globe once every 90 minutes. Once up there, space tourists will get to see the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights through the space station’s many windows. ‘Space condominiums’ in orbit could soon go on sale | Credit: Orion Spanĭesigned as the first fully modular space station, Aurora Station will host six people simultaneously, including two crew members. However, it gets a little more expensive than that, with a standard 12-day journey actually costing US$9.5 million per person. Those with an US$80,000 deposit can guarantee their spot on Aurora Station, which is slated to host its first guests in 2022. If so, you’d better act fast because US space company Orion Span‘s proposed luxury space hotel is already booked up for its first four months. Want to see the Northern Lights … from above? If selected by NASA, Dragonfly would launch in 2025 and reach Titan in 2034. It’s risky, because Dragonfly won’t know much about what it’s going to land on, but it will be vastly more mobile than any planetary rover. That data alone will vastly increase astronomers’ knowledge of Titan, but Dragonfly will then take a flight every 16 days to another area, perhaps tens of kilometres away. The two-year mission plan for Dragonfly would see it touch-down on a vast black sand dune where a safe landing can be assured, to take measurements of the weather, temperature, seismic activity. Huygens remains the most distant lander ever launched from Earth. It took some spectacular footage and sent back a few atmospheric measurements, but the mission only had the battery power for 2.5 hours of data transmission. While flying in the thin atmosphere of Mars is a real technical challenge, the same is definitely not true of NASA’s other proposed exploratory helicopter.Ī competitor within NASA’s New Frontiers Program, Dragonfly will have no trouble at all keeping buoyant in the dense atmosphere in Titan, where even a human could fly just by flapping their arms.ĭragonfly is a dual-quadcopter destined for Saturn’s moon Titan | Credit: John Hopkins APL/Steve GribbenĪ high priority for planetary exploration (though any attempt to stay on Titan would require new technology), Saturn’s largest moon has been landed on once before, in 2005 by the Cassini spacecraft‘s tiny Huygens probe. If it works well, it could quickly become a standard issue instrument on Mars missions. It’s only a 30-day test, to include up to five flights from three meters to up to a few hundred meters, and only for between 30 and 90 seconds. “Instead, we have an autonomous capability that will be able to receive and interpret commands from the ground, and then fly the mission on its own.” “We don’t have a pilot and Earth will be several light minutes away, so there is no way to joystick this mission in real time,” said Aung. The Mars Helicopter will be a ‘high risk’ experiment attached to the belly of the Mars 2020 rover, which is expected to leave Earth in July 2020 and reach Mars in February 2021. In fact, it’s not even the only drone destined to explore another world. However, the Mars Helicopter is not the only audacious concept for space exploration. “To make it fly at that low atmospheric density, we had to scrutinize everything, make it as light as possible while being as strong and as powerful as it can possibly be,” said Aung. Secondly, it’s twin counter-rotating blades will attempt to cut the thin Martian atmosphere at just shy of 3,000 rpm, which is about 10 times the rate of a helicopter on Earth. “The atmosphere of Mars is only 1% that of Earth, so when our helicopter is on the Martian surface, it’s already at the Earth equivalent of 100,000 feet up.”įirstly, that’s meant shrinking the Mars helicopter to a little under 4 lbs./1.8 kg. “The altitude record for a helicopter flying here on Earth is about 40,000 feet,” said Mimi Aung, Mars Helicopter project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). However, heavier-than-air has a very different meaning on Mars, which has a much lower atmospheric density than Earth. NASA has announced that a Mars Helicopter, a small autonomous rotorcraft, will travel with the agency’s Mars 2020 rover mission as a demonstration experiment of heavier-than-air vehicles on Mars. That’s how far NASA’s beloved Curiosity rover has traveled across the surface of Mars in its six years at the Red Planet.