Mars 2020 has worked to accommodate the Mars Helicopter and is not concerned about any technical risk to the mission from the helicopter.
Mars Helicopter will be attached to the belly pan of the Mars 2020 rover and placed on the surface upon finding a suitable site after the rover’s February 2021 landing.
The Mars 2020 mission includes a payload named MOXIE that will test producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere as an in situ resource utilization technology.
Mars 2020 intends to build a new heat shield using the actual Mars Science Laboratory design.
The Mars 2020 heat shield, a pathfinder based on the Mars Science Laboratory design, cracked during testing earlier in the month at a Lockheed Martin facility.
The helicopter is being developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory independently of the Mars 2020 mission with coordination to ensure the helicopter could be added to the rover.
Mars 2020 is developing improved parachutes after concerns raised by failures on NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator project.
The Mars 2020 project has completed accommodations necessary to carry the helicopter on the rover.
The late-May Key Decision Point D review will give NASA the opportunity to decide whether to include a small helicopter on Mars 2020.
The four projects SLS, Exploration Ground Systems, Mars 2020, and SGSS accounted for $638,000,000 of a $646,700,000 net cost increase among NASA projects in development in 2017.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working with Lockheed Martin to determine the cause of the cracking in the Mars 2020 heat shield structure.
JPL expects the repair of the damaged heat shield structure and construction of a replacement to have no effect on Mars 2020’s planned July 2020 launch.
Mars 2020 is based on the Mars Science Laboratory design and uses the same approach for entry, descent, and landing as the MSL mission.
A composite structure that is part of the heat shield for the Mars 2020 spacecraft cracked during testing at a Lockheed Martin facility near Denver.