NASA Flies Helicopter on Mars

NASA has made the recent announcement that it will start the small helicopter under its space agency 2020 mission. This mission is one of the space agency missions to plan to send the next generation rover to red planet. NASA could set up huge milestone in the history of the world and the small rotorcraft would be the aircraft flew on anywhere but the earth.

If you think that it is not the big deal, you should think again and there may be very large community and UAV enthusiasts but one should understand the atmosphere on Mars, which is very different from atmosphere of earth. We can make the calculations on at Earth and they are actually flawed, when it is implemented on atmosphere of Mars. Tiny UAV is the remote controlled rotorcraft, which is specially designed to fly in the atmosphere of Mars.

The UAV is built on twin counter rotating blades architecture its fuselage is only few inches and whole package has the weight of four pounds. The blades of UAV will spin at about 3000 RPM, which is about 10 times more than rate employed on the Earth. NASA stated that the rotorcraft will be attached to rover when the car sized vehicle will land on the Mars. The rover will place rotorcraft on its surface and will back away to safe distance. The rover will operate as relay node to forward the commands from Earth to rotorcraft. NASA added that UAV will start its first autonomous flights, when the batteries are charged and the tests are done.

NASA will conduct the tests over the duration of 30 days and it will include the five test flights. The test flights are involved with starting with sufficient lift to get the altitude of 10 feet and hover for 30 seconds. When the tests progressed forward, the final one will get the UAV covering the distance of few hundred yards and the flight time of about 90 seconds.
NASA reported that the rotorcraft will be added with solar cells to charge the lithium ion batteries that power the UAV. The rotorcraft is added the heated mechanismto keep the UAV warm during the severe nights.