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Mars Helicopter National Aeronautics and Space Adinistration The Mars Helicopter is a small, autonomous aircraft that will be carried to the surface on the Red Planet attached to the belly of the Mars 2020 rover. Its mission is experimental in nature and completely independent of the Mars 2020 science mission. A series of flight tests will be performed over a 30-Martian-day experimental window that will begin sometime in the spring of 2021. The Mars 2020 rover, with the Mars Helicopter aboard, will launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in July 2020 from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It is hitching a ride on the Perseverance rover . The helicopter will be first aircraft to perform flight tests on another planet. The Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, is a technology demonstration to test powered flight on another world for the first time.