NASA announced Friday that its Mars 2020 rover mission will carry a helicopter, or “marscopter,” to the Red Planet. NASA said the copter—the result of four years of design, testing, and redesign—weighs in at little under four pounds and has a fuselage about the size of a softball. Twin, counter-rotating blades will bite into the thin Martian atmosphere at almost 3,000 rpm—about 10 times the rate of a helicopter on Earth.
“The altitude record for a helicopter flying here on Earth is about 40,000 feet,” Mimi Aung, Mars helicopter project manager at JPL, said. “The atmosphere of Mars is only one percent that of Earth, so when our helicopter is on the Martian surface, it’s already at the Earth equivalent of 100,000 feet up. 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.”
Once the rover is on the planet’s surface, it will deploy the helicopter in a suitable location and then drive away to a safe distance from which it will relay commands, allowing the copter’s batteries to charge and performing tests. Then, controllers on Earth will relay a command to the helicopter to take its first autonomous flight into history.
“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. “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.”
On its first flight, the helicopter will make a short vertical climb to three meters, where it will hover for about 30 seconds. The full 30-day campaign will include up to five flights of incrementally farther distances, up to a few hundred meters and durations as long as 90 seconds.
NASA considers the Mars Helicopter a high-risk, high-reward project. Failure will not impact other aspects of the Mars 2020 mission. Success could signal that helicopters may have a future as low-flying scouts and aerial vehicles to access locations not reachable by ground travel.
“The ability to see clearly what lies beyond the next hill is crucial for future explorers,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “We already have great views of Mars from the surface as well as from orbit. With the added dimension of a bird’s-eye view from a ‘marscopter,’ we can only imagine what future missions will achieve.”
Mars 2020 is scheduled to launch in July 2020 on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and is expected to reach Mars in February 2021.
