Mars Helicopter Finished Flight Tests With Flying Colors

If things go according to plan, in 2021, NASA will have a rover landed on Mars’s surface, and it may have another passenger onboard. Last year, NASA revealed that it was developing the Mars Helicopter weighing four pounds to hitch-hike the Mars 2020 rover.

After a testing session that lasted for two months, the helicopter is now ready for its first mission on Mars, proving that another option for exploring outer space planets is possible.

According to NASA, the first thing they had to do is to make a Mars-like environment on Earth. The team did that by taking out oxygen, nitrogen and adding carbon dioxide so that the Space Simulator vacuum chamber resembles Mars’s atmosphere. The red planet has a smaller gravity force than the Earth, so they had to fix a motorized lanyard on their test subject. Teddy Tzanetos, Robotics Technologist in the Robotics Mobility Group, the test conductor, said that both the helicopter and the offloading system worked well.

In the second test, the helicopter kept itself airborne in one minute less than what it did in the first one. However, that much time was enough to conclude that it functioned well.

Both the helicopter and the offloading system worked well

With the tests’ success, the team claimed that the helicopter could accompany Mars rover in 2020 and would probably fulfill its mission.

When the helicopter makes it to Mars, it will conduct a few flight tests; each lasts for as long as 90 seconds. If it can handle real Mars’s environment, this research can have a significant practical application.

The helicopter can provide another perspective on Mars, in addition to the one from the ground and the one from its orbit. For example, it can provide information on what is behind the hills ahead of the rover. With the Mars helicopter in place, NASA said that future research on the red planet would have a lot more potential.