NASA Mars Helicopter Team Striving for a “Kitty Hawk” Moment
NASA Mars Helicopter Team Striving for a “Kitty Hawk” Moment NASA’s next Mars exploration ground vehicle, Mars 2020 Rover, will carry along what could become the first aircraft to fly on another planet. By Richard Whittle he world altitude record for a helicopter was set on June 12, 1972, when Aérospatiale chief test pilot Jean Boulet coaxed T his company’s first SA 315 Lama to a hair-raising 12,442 m (40,820 ft) above sea level at Aérodrome d’Istres, northwest of Marseille, France. Roughly a year from now, NASA hopes to fly an electric helicopter at altitudes equivalent to two and a half times Boulet’s enduring record. But NASA’s small, unmanned machine actually will fly only about five meters above the surface where it is to take off and land — the planet Mars. Members of NASA’s Mars Helicopter team prepare the flight model (the actual vehicle going to Mars) for a test in the JPL The NASA Mars Helicopter is to make a seven-month trip to its Space Simulator on Jan. 18, 2019. (NASA photo) destination folded up and attached to the underbelly of the Mars 2020 Rover, “Perseverance,” a 10-foot-long (3 m), 9-foot-wide (2.7 The atmosphere of Mars — 95% carbon dioxide — is about one m), 7-foot-tall (2.13 m), 2,260-lb (1,025-kg) ground exploration percent as dense as the atmosphere of Earth. That makes flying at vehicle. The Rover is scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral five meters on Mars “equal to about 100,000 feet [30,480 m] above this July on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket and targeted sea level here on Earth,” noted Balaram.
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