This is amazing stuff. Still blows my mind anything can fly in an atmosphere 1% of Earth’s.
They flew it in a semi vacuum {1%}chamber and it worked. Don’t know how they compensated for 1/3 G. Or if they even tried.
Oops. Wikipedia says
For flight testing, a large vacuum chamber was used to simulate the very low atmospheric pressure of Mars – filled with carbon dioxide to approximately 0.60% (about 1⁄160) of standard atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth – which is roughly equivalent to a helicopter flying at 34,000 m (112,000 ft) altitude in the atmosphere of Earth. In order to simulate the much reduced gravity field of Mars (38% of Earth’s), 62% of Earth’s gravity was offset by a line pulling upwards during flight tests.[8]