AeroVironment and NASA JPL Partner on SkyFall Multi-Drone Autonomous Mission
NASA and AeroVironment are co-developing SkyFall, a three-rotorcraft mission launching in late 2028 to conduct subsurface radar and infrared sensing on Mars, advancing dual-use aerial autonomy and multi-agent sensor networks.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and defense prime AeroVironment are co-developing the SkyFall mission, significantly expanding upon the operational flight heritage of the history-making Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. Scheduled for launch in late 2028 aboard NASA’s Space Reactor-1 Freedom, the project will deploy a trio of next-generation rotorcraft to the Red Planet in December 2028. The program represents a substantial advancement in multi-vehicle autonomous operations, utilizing advanced aerial sensing architectures to conduct subsurface radar profiling and high-resolution near-infrared regolith mapping within thin-density atmospheric conditions.
Each SkyFall helicopter is equipped with a payload suite of four specialized mission instruments, including green-frequency subsurface sounding radar and red-spectrum near-infrared imagers. Building on Ingenuity’s landmark performance—which completed 72 operational flights over nearly three years—SkyFall transitions planetary aerial exploration from an initial single-platform technology demonstration into a distributed, multi-rotorcraft sensor network. These co-located aerial platforms will execute synchronized data-gathering passes, generating precise topological models and actionable scouting intelligence to streamline surface traversal and mission planning for future surface assets.
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