Several competing unmanned aerial vehicle missions are likely to be proposed for flight on Mars in NASA's next Scout competition, according to Andy Gonzales, program manager for NASA Ames Research Center's MATADOR project.

Set to begin in roughly a year, the next Mars Scout competition will select one or more missions for launch to Mars in 2011. If upcoming flight-tests of MATADOR (Mars Advanced Technology Airplane for Deployment, Operations, and Recovery) are successful, the team may propose a mission, according to Gonzales. "We're hopeful that the [Mars] airplane's time has finally come," he told The DAILY.

Another Scout contender is likely to be NASA Langley Research Center's Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey (ARES) team, which made the finals in the 2007 Mars Scout competition but lost out to the Phoenix lander. "We anticipate two to three, maybe as many as four, airplane concepts" in the running, Gonzales said.

Mars UAV proposals have been at a disadvantage when competing with orbiters, rovers, or landers because of their comparatively short mission duration (DAILY, Dec. 23, 2002). MATADOR is trying to compensate for this by developing a UAV that could survive its landing on Mars and continue to relay data or perform other measurements on the surface.

"The integrated concept we came up with is an airplane that has attitude control thrusters, so now it's essentially something like a Harrier," Gonzales said. The rocket thruster would pulse to keep the aircraft flying over Mars for 45 minutes to an hour, during which it would cover 300-400 kilometers (186-249 miles), according to Gonzales.

Previous Mars UAV concepts were designed to crash-land following their mission, which created a problem - because the UAV gathers sensor data faster than it can transmit it, recovering all the data requires a nearby relay or the construction of a black box-type recorder that can survive the crash.

MATADOR would attempt to survive its landing by performing a pull-up maneuver and then falling almost vertically to the ground, belly-first. "You wouldn't fly again, but your data is now safe onboard," Gonzales said. The UAV would now be able to transmit the rest of its data and possibly conduct additional measurements of the surface.

MATADOR is set to conduct a test flight high in Earth's atmosphere in August 2005, followed by one or more follow-up flights a year later. A scale model of the aircraft will be released by a balloon at 100,000 feet, where the thin atmosphere approximates conditions on Mars. The MATADOR aircraft is being designed and built by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).