Until now, the only things that NASA has sent to the surface of Mars, were slow-moving rovers and stationery landers. But the great news is that they have another plan: a robotic plane, that is powered by a rocket, will soar a mile over the Martian landscape at 450 miles per hour, so they can see hundreds of miles of unexplored Mars ground.
Unfortunately, the robot will be able to fly just 2 ours, unlike NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers, who were supposed to work for a couple of months, but have lasted six years. This new robotic plane it’s called the ARES ( Aerial Regional-Scale Environmental Surveyor ), and within the 2 ours of surveillance, it has to cover 1,000 miles of Mars, casing the atmosphere, searching for water and trying to get a feel for the planet’s crustal magnetism.
As you may probably think, this project is kinda of expensive, and landing a plane there, it might be a very difficult task to fulfill, but it seems that NASA had already figured it out. ARES will be detached from a carrier ship about 12 hours from the Martian planet.
