When NASA's three SkyFall helicopters take to the Martian skies, one of their tasks will be to hunt for frozen water — a critical resource for future astronauts — using ground-penetrating radar. For that radar to work, each helicopter needs an antenna light enough to fly. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have just put that antenna through its paces.
The hardware in question is a flexible, fabric-based antenna that can be bent and folded. In JPL's Environmental Test Laboratory, engineers bent the antenna to simulate one possible orientation after a SkyFall flight on Mars, and tested the design in an electromagnetic interference chamber. The stress campaign even included simulated landings: the antenna survived roughly 200 of them with no loss of signal — more than double the requirement for the prime mission, according to coverage of the JPL tests.
Radar engineer Maya Román connected a coaxial cable to a test antenna in the EMI testing chamber, where the antenna was pointed upward during the measurement to minimize reflections and interference. The lightweight, bendable design — JPL has demoed it as a kind of trailing "tuxedo tail" behind a model helicopter — is key to a mission concept that takes the rotorcraft lessons of Ingenuity, which flew 72 times over nearly three years, and scales them up.
SkyFall plans to send three compact helicopters to Mars, each carrying four instruments, to demonstrate how low-altitude aerial surveys can locate subsurface water ice — a capability that could guide where astronauts land and what they can draw on once they arrive. The radar antenna tests, documented by JPL in early August, mark another step toward making those water-hunting flights a reality.
