Saturn's mysterious moon may have airplanes in its future. - By
Tony Reichhardt - Air & Space magazine, July 2010
ESA/NASA/JPL/University Of Arizona In his 30-odd years designing
aircraft, Rick Foch has, believe it or not, seen trickier
problems than this one. His shop at the U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory in Washington, D.C., has invented dozens of unmanned
aerial vehicles of all shapes and dimensions, from a UAV that
folds up in a Marine’s backpack (Dragon Eye, 2000) to a small
drone launched from a Predator (Finder, 2000) to a winged radar
target that can withstand 10,000 Gs while being shot from a
ship’s gun (FLYRT, 1991). Foch understands the difficulty of
sending a robot airplane to fly, with almost no human
supervision, for a full year in an alien atmosphere nearly a
billion miles away—around Saturn’s moon Titan. But it’s doable,
he says. You want tough? Try designing an airplane for Mars.
Foch has done that too. Of all the worlds in our solar system,
only a few have atmospheres that would allow winged