London, Oct 12 (ANI): After retiring from its expensive shuttle missions, NASA is currently exploring a cheaper form of space travel - balloons.
The agency is spending 10 million dollars trialling a series of blimps that could travel across the surface of planets and moons and for use in future missions.
The balloons would be used to transport equipment on unmanned missions. First stop on the list of potential destinations for a balloon to orbit is Saturn's biggest moon Titan.
To survive there, a balloon, designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, would have to withstand temperatures around -180 degrees Celsius.
Prototypes for the project are being tested at high altitudes by Oregon-based firm Near Space Corp, which employs just 15 people.
"We can simulate the Mars atmosphere that they would have to pass through," the Daily Mail quoted Tim Lachenmeier, Near Space Corp's president as telling Msnbc.com.
One of the company's most ambitious projects for Nasa had involved testing the components for an airplane that would be flown to Mars inside a spacecraft, then unfold itself and fly through the Red Planet's thin atmosphere. (ANI)
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