Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects a Next Generation Mars Helicopter rotor blade before testing it at supersonic speeds in a 25-foot space simulator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in November 2025.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects a Next Generation Mars Helicopter rotor blade before testing it at supersonic speeds in a 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-bladed rotor design that could be flown on missions after Skyfall. The second test campaign used the actual two-bladed design that would fly on Skyfall. These blades are slightly longer, so they reach the same supersonic speed at lower RPM. The faster spin resulted in a 30 percent increase in lift capacity.
The team increased the rotor tip speed to Mach 1.08, increasing the lift capacity of the Mars vehicle by 30 percent. This success allows future missions to support heavier scientific payloads, including advanced sensors and larger batteries for extended flight.
“We thought we’d be lucky to hit Mach 1.05, and we got to Mach 1.08 on our last run. 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 amazing,” said Shanna Withrow-Messer, an aerodynamicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
At the same time as engineers are preparing to send more helicopters to Mars, NASA is working on a more massive rotorcraft called Dragonfly for Saturn’s moon Titan. The dragonfly would weigh about a ton, but flying over more distant Titan poses fewer challenges than Mars because its atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s.
The only payload on Simplicity The helicopter had two cameras: a black-and-white imager for navigation and a high-resolution color camera. Its longest flight in 2022 covered less than half a mile and lasted 161 seconds. The aircraft had to land and recharge its batteries using solar arrays, and it used the nearby Perseverance rover as a base station to communicate with ground teams on Earth.
The Skyfall mission will not have any rover. The helicopters must communicate with mission controllers via orbiting relay satellites or direct-to-Earth links. Future rotorcraft will use larger batteries to enable longer flights. Scientists would like to put more sophisticated instruments on Mars helicopters to search for things like ice in the Martian soil. Heavy vehicles will be required for all this.
Breaking the sound barrier without breaking the hardware gets us closer to fully exploiting this new way of exploring planets.
<a href