Rotorcraft
NASA's Mars Helicopter Ready for Red Planet Flight
NASA helicopter scheduled to fly on Mars in 2021.
NASA's four-pound helicopter is expected to fly on Mars in 2021.
NASA's four-pound helicopter is expected to fly on Mars in 2021.

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.