NASA’s Mars Helicopter is completing Earthbound flight testing and is being incorporated into the mission package for a July 2020 Cape Canaveral launch aboard an Atlas V rocket bound for a landing on the Red Planet in February 2021. "The next time we fly, we fly on Mars," said MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Helicopter at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL tested the four-pound helicopter in the laboratory’s space simulator, a 25-foot-wide vacuum chamber injected with carbon dioxide to mimic the atmospheric composition and pressure found on Mars, where the atmospheric density is 1 percent of Earth’s.
"Our test flights could have similar atmospheric density here on Earth, if you put your airfield 100,000 feet up. So you can't go somewhere and find that. You have to make it," Aung said. The test team also had to simulate Mars’ gravity in the simulator—about two-thirds of that found on Earth. It accomplished this by attaching a motorized lanyard called a “gravity offload system” to the top of the helicopter to simulate the appropriate gravitational forces. Data sets from the helicopter were obtained to confirm its ability to fly autonomously in the thin Martian atmosphere. Two test flights were performed in the vacuum chamber totaling one minute of flight time at an altitude of two inches.
Before that, JPL conducted 75 minutes of flight time on an engineering model designed to approximate the Mars Helicopter. The Mars Helicopter consists of 1,500 individual pieces of carbon fiber, flight-grade aluminum, silicon, copper, foil, and foam. It will be paired with the Mars 2020 Rover and used to conduct geological and environmental assessments, assess life signs, natural resources, and hazards. Scientists will use the rover to identify and collect rock and soil samples, encase them in sealed tubes, and leave them on the planet's surface for potential future retrieval. The Mars Helicopter is scheduled to begin actual test flights on Mars within the few months of its arrival there. Initial flights on the planet will be up to 90 seconds long.