  Any rotorcraft on Mars will fly in a low pressure and dusty environment. It
is well known that helicopters on Earth become highly-charged due, in part, to
triboelectric effects when flying in sandy conditions. We consider the
possibility that the Mars Helicopter Scout (MHS), called Ingenuity, flying at
Mars as part of the Mars2020 Perseverance mission, will also become charged due
to grain-rotor triboelectric interactions. Given the low Martian atmospheric
pressure of ~ 5 Torr, the tribocharge on the blade could become intense enough
to stimulate gas breakdown near the surface of the rotorcraft. We modeled the
grain-blade interaction as a line of current that forms along the blade edge in
the region where grain-blade contacts are the greatest. This current then
spreads throughout the entire connected quasi-conductive regions of the
rotorcraft. Charge builds up on the craft and the dissipative pathway to remove
charge is back into the atmosphere. We find that for blade tribocharging
currents that form in an ambient atmospheric dust load, system current balance
and charge dissipation can be accomplished via the nominal atmospheric
conductive currents. However, at takeoff and landing, the rotorcraft could be
in a rotor-created particulate cloud, leading to local atmospheric electrical
breakdown near the rotorcraft. We especially note that the atmospheric currents
in the breakdown are not large enough to create any hazard to Ingenuity itself,
but Ingenuity operations can be considered a unique experiment that provides a
test of the electrical properties of the Martian near-surface atmosphere.
