Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects the rotor blade of a next-generation Mars helicopter before testing it at supersonic speeds in the 25-foot space simulator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in November 2025.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects the rotor blade of a next-generation Mars helicopter before testing it at supersonic speeds in the 25-foot space simulator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in November 2025.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The first series of tests used a three-blade rotor design that could fly on post-SkyFall missions. A second test campaign used the actual two-blade design that will fly at SkyFall. These blades are slightly longer, so they reached the same supersonic speed at lower revolutions. The faster turn resulted in a 30 percent increase in lifting capacity.
The team increased rotor tip speeds to Mach 1.08, increasing the Mars rover’s lift capacity by 30 percent. This advancement will allow future missions to support heavier scientific payloads, including advanced sensors and larger batteries for extended flights.
“We thought we’d be lucky to hit Mach 1.05, and we hit Mach 1.08 on our last few runs. We’re still digging into the data, and there may be even more thrust on the table. These next-generation helicopters are going to be incredible,” said Shannah Withrow-Maser, an aerodynamicist at NASA Ames Research Center.
At the same time engineers are preparing to send more helicopters to Mars, NASA is working on a more massive helicopter. helicopter called Dragonfly destined for Titan, Saturn’s moon. Dragonfly will weigh almost a ton, but flying on more distant Titan poses fewer challenges than Mars because its atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s.
The only payloads in the Wit The helicopter had two cameras: a black and white camera for navigation and a higher resolution color camera. Its longest flight in 2022 covered less than half a mile and lasted 161 seconds. The plane had to land and recharge its batteries using solar panels, and used the nearby Perseverance rover as a base station to communicate with ground equipment on Earth.
The SkyFall mission will not have a rover nearby. The helicopters will have to communicate with mission controllers via orbiting relay satellites or a direct link to Earth. Future helicopters will use larger batteries to allow longer flights. Scientists would like to mount more sophisticated instruments on Martian helicopters to look for things like ice on the Martian soil. All of this will require heavier vehicles.
Breaking the sound barrier without breaking the hardware brings us one step closer to fully exploiting this new mode of planetary exploration.
