A flying drone fitted with counter-rotating blades, on-board autonomy, and a lightweight carbon-fiber fuselage will ride to the Red Planet with NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, officials announced Friday.

Bound for the International Space Station with a max load of fresh supplies, a commercially-operated cargo ship was mounted atop its booster rocket today for liftoff from Cape Canaveral on March 22.

A stack of four satellites, each one carrying 25 science sensors and together will perfect the art of formation flying, are being packaged inside an Atlas 5 rocket nose cone in preparation for mounting atop the booster next week.