WASHINGTON — NASA and AeroVironment are moving ahead with the development of a set of helicopters to be sent to Mars on a nuclear propulsion demonstration mission at the end of 2028.
AeroVironment announced Aug. 27 it received a contract from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the co-design and co-manufacture of three Mars helicopters for NASA’s SkyFall mission. The company did not disclose the value of the contract.
NASA announced SkyFall at its Ignition event in March as a payload on its Space Reactor 1 Freedom mission, which is scheduled to launch in late 2028 to test nuclear electric propulsion. SkyFall was described then as a trio of helicopters based on the Ingenuity helicopter flown to Mars on the Perseverance rover in 2021.
The agency said little about the helicopters at the time beyond their heritage and plans to include ground-penetrating radar instruments on them to allow them to survey for subsurface ice. That radar, JPL said in a release earlier this month, will use a flexible, fabric-based antenna with metallic elements, enabling it to probe between 12 and 60 centimeters below the surface.
The SkyFall helicopters themselves will be slightly larger versions of Ingenuity. “If you don’t have a scale bar, certainly they will look almost identical,” said Will Pomerantz, head of space ventures at AeroVironment, in an interview. The helicopters will have larger rotors to carry a larger payload, such as the ground-penetrating radar.
