On a test flight in Death Valley, California, an Airbus helicopter carried an engineering model of the Lander Vision System (LVS) that will help guide NASA’s next Mars mission to a safe touchdown on the Red Planet. During the flight – one in a series—the helicopter (which is not part of the mission and was used just for testing) and its two-person crew flew a pre-planned sequence of maneuvers while LVS collected and analyzed imagery of the barren, mountainous terrain below.
![](https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/csz/news/tmb/2019/2-nasasmars202.jpg)
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-nasa-mars-mission-death-valley.html