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11 May 2018

NASA is sending an autonomous helicopter to Mars in 2020

The MarsCopter will take flight on the Red Planet in 2020
The MarsCopter will take flight on the Red Planet in 2021


NASA’s next Mars mission will have a helicopter onboard. The Mars 2020 mission, slated to launch in July 2020, is a rover designed to look for signs of past or present life on the Red Planet. NASA has just announced that another explorer called the Mars Helicopter will be hitching a ride.

The rotor craft weighs in at only 1.8 kilograms, and it will fly to Mars attached to the underbelly of the rover. Once they land, the rover will drop off its stowaway and continue to relay commands from the ground. Those commands will take several minutes to reach the helicopter from Earth, so it will need some autonomous capabilities to make sure it can fly on its own, without anyone controlling it in real time.

NASA plans to use the Mars Helicopter on five flights over the course of 30 days, covering distances up to a few hundred metres in 90 seconds or less.


“This is really a much better way to travel hundreds of metres at a time,” NASA engineer Bobak Ferdowsi tweeted. The Curiosity rover can only travel about 100 metres per Martian day. The helicopter won’t have to navigate the rocky terrain, so it will be able to cover ground much faster.

That would be a boon to any future missions to take samples on Mars and return them to Earth for analysis.

Not only will an aircraft be able to move around faster than rovers, it will also be able to reach areas they cannot get to. The Mars Helicopter will be the first helicopter to hover over another planet, and if it is successful we’ll have a whole new way to explore other worlds.

Read more: How we could make oxygen on Mars, plus fuel to get home

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