Nasa will send helicopter to Mars to test otherworldly flight
Media playback is unsupported on your device Nasa is sending a helicopter to Mars, in the first test of a heavier-than-air aircraft on another planet.The Mars Helicopter will be bundled with the US space agency's Mars rover when it launches in 2020.Its design team spent more than four years shrinking a working helicopter to "the size of a softball" and cutting its weight to 1.8kg (4lbs).It is specifically designed to fly in the atmosphere of Mars, which is 100 times thinner than Earth's.Nasa describes the helicopter as a "heavier-than-air" aircraft because the other type - sometimes called an aerostat - are balloons and blimps. Soviet scientists dropped two balloons into the atmosphere of Venus in the 1980s. No aircraft has ever taken off from...