Specialists involved in the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Mars project have completed work on the creation of a 4-kilogram aircraft that will go to the Red Planet along with the Mars 2020 rover.
But before this happens, it is necessary to prove that the helicopter can actually fly in Martian conditions. Therefore, at the end of January, the project team reproduced the much less dense atmosphere of our neighboring planet in the JPL space simulator to make sure that the created helicopter could take off there. They reportedly managed to successfully conduct two test flights of the helicopter in Martian conditions.
If not for the simulator, the researchers would have had to conduct flight tests at an altitude of 100 feet (000 km), since the atmosphere on Mars is only about 30,5% of Earth's.
Source: 3dnews.ru