The NASA is working on innovative helicopter blade designs for future Mars missions, aiming to significantly increase flight range on the Red Planet.
The new design, named roamx-0201, was developed by a team of researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, in collaboration with Imperial College London and Nagoya University in Japan. This blade profile, thinner and asymmetrical, was optimized through advanced computer simulations and wind tunnel tests replicating Martian atmospheric conditions.
Results show these blades could enable future helicopters to cover up to 18.7 kilometers in a single flight, a major increase compared to the 0.7 kilometers achieved by Ingenuity, the first helicopter to fly on Mars in 2021.
This improvement is notably due to better management of aerodynamic drag, delaying the “drag divergence” phenomenon that limits rotor performance at high speeds in Mars’ thin atmosphere.
These technological advances pave the way for the SkyFall mission, planned for 2028, which will carry three helicopters to Mars, opening the door to more extensive and efficient exploration of the Martian surface.