Flight Of The Navigator

In a space exploration first, NASA is preparing to deploy a chopper on the Red Planet. Flying in a fraction of Earth’s gravity, it should be a sight to behold…

- Paul Parsons

Whether disrupting air traffic, returning glorious vistas of Earth from above, or just spying on the neighbours (if that’s your thing), drones have become a familiar sight in our skies. Now, for the first time, the US space agency NASA is poised to fly a drone-like helicopter in the atmosphere of another planet.

The craft, named Ingenuity, will hitch a ride to the Red Planet aboard the one-tonne Perseverance lander, NASA’s latest wheeled robotic rover mission to drive across the planet’s rugged surface. Perseverance will launch from Earth soon, with a touch down on Mars scheduled for 18 February 2021.

Flying in the alien atmosphere of another world is a feat that poses a unique set of engineering challenges and yet, if this small technology test mission is successful, it will furnish scientists with a new and highly effective way to explore the planets and moons of our solar system. That’s because flying is a much faster way to get around than ground roving. Aircraft can gather aerial imagery that’s much sharper than pictures returned by spacecraft. They can also serve as scouts to identify potential targets for ground-based rover vehicles, and they can even gather samples and bring them back to a central lander station for analysis. And, of course, they can go where other probes simply can’t.