 It's official, NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars, a small one, and a robotic one, and it's going to be complimenting the Mars 2020 rover to collect more data while at Mars. This is your space pod for Tuesday, May 15th, 2018. Not only will this vehicle demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier than air vehicles on the red planet, it will collect valuable science as well as some awesome imagery of the Mars 2020 rover. The project was started in August of 2013 as a technology department project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL. The results of the team's four-year design, testing, and redesign weighs in at a little under four pounds, or 1.8 kilograms. Its fuselage is about the size of a softball, and its twin counter-rotating blades will bite into the Martian thin atmosphere at almost 3,000 revolutions per minute, about 10 times the rate of a helicopter on Earth. The helicopter also contains built-in capabilities needed for operations at Mars, including solar cells to charge its lithium-ion batteries, and a heating mechanism to keep it warm through the cold Martian nights. But before the helicopter can fly at Mars, it has to get there. It'll do so attached to the belly pan of the Mars 2020 rover, which is identical to the Curiosity rover. Once the rover is on the planet's surface, a suitable location will be found to deploy the helicopter down from the vehicle and place it onto the ground, and then the rover will be driven away from the helicopter at a safe distance, and the commands will be relayed to the helicopter. After its batteries are charged and several tests are performed, controllers on Earth will command the Mars helicopter to take its first autonomous flight into history. They don't have a pilot, and the delay from Earth is several light minutes anyway, so there's no way that they will be able to have a joystick controller to do it in real time. At least according to Mimi Ong, who is a project manager at JPL, she said that instead, we have an autonomous capability that will be able to receive and interpret commands from the ground and then fly the mission on its own. The full 30-day test flight campaign will include up to five flights of incrementally further flight distances, up to a few hundred meters and longer durations as long as 90 seconds over a period. On its first flight, the helicopter will make a short vertical climb to three meters, where it will hover for about 30 seconds. As a technology demonstration mission, the Mars helicopter is considered a high-risk but high-reward project. If it does not work, the Mars 2020 mission will not be impacted. If it does work, helicopters may have a real future as low-flying scouts and aerial vehicles to access locations not reachable by ground travel on Mars. In any case, the Mars 2020 rover will be launched on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 in Cape Canaveral and is expected to reach Mars in February of 2021. So be sure, if you haven't already, to check out our last live show, where we talked with Tim Ellis from Relativity Space, the CEO of Relativity Space. That was a very awesome interview. So be sure to check that out if you haven't already and every live show that we have every Saturday at 1800 Coordinated Universal Time. Until the next time, I see you guys, though. Keep on moving onwards and upwards, and don't forget, add Astra to the stars.