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As Above So Below
NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars to get a bird’s-eye view of the planet
When NASA launches its next rover to Mars, the vehicle will have a small helicopter along for the ride. NASA announced today that it will be sending a small autonomous flying chopper — aptly named the Mars Helicopter — with the upcoming Mars 2020 rover. The helicopter will attempt to fly through the Martian air to see if vehicles can even levitate on Mars, where the atmosphere is 100 times thinner than that of Earth.
The design for the Mars Helicopter has been in the works for the last four years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but the space agency had yet to decide if it was actually going to send the vehicle to Mars. NASA needed to determine if this technology was actually feasible and if the agency had enough money in its budget to include the copter, according to Spaceflight Now. Now it seems that the agency has decided that this copter idea could actually work.
But even if the helicopter fails to fly, it won’t affect the overall mission of the Mars 2020 rover — the successor to NASA’s Curiosity rover which is already on the Red Planet’s surface. But if the Mars Helicopter doesindeed fly, it’ll be able to capture a rare bird’s-eye-view of Mars with its two cameras, something that’s never been done before. And that may mean it’s possible to send future flying vehicles to Mars to scout out locations that are hard to access.
