Cool article, but I would take issue with the title, and justification for that.

With appropriate sensor technology on the helicopter (a time of flight camera, like that in a Huawei mobile phone), progressively creating a 3d virtual replica of the environment around the helicopter “on the fly”, relative to the position and orientation of the helicopter, and displaying that as a virtual environment around a human pilot on Earth, the pilot can fly an avatar of the helicopter as if in real time, within the virtual world, whilst the position and orientation of the actual helicopter on Mars simply tracks the position of the avatar.

So in effect, the pilot flies a simulated helicopter around a replicated Mars terrain, whilst the real helicopter flies identically around the real terrain, delayed by the round trip communications delay between Mars and Earth.

It might be thought that bandwidth could be an issue.

True, whilst an initial view of the terrain is generated, so initially flight would need to be hesitant, to allow sufficient virtual terrain to appear initially, but after that, only small bandwidth comparable with that needed to interact with a modest MMORP game is required, to upate terrain resolutions depending on proximity.

Further, the persistent 3D virtual environment generated as a by-product of the piloting remains after flight as a detailed 3d survey, which would be incredibly valuable in the case of Mars, or any other extraterrestrial body.

This was subject of an Open University Phd research project “The Possibilities of First-Person-View Interactions between the Users of Virtual Worlds, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” from 2017 until suspended indefinitely in 2020, after the project ran into commercial difficulties due to project finances being frozen indirectly by US sanction, compounded by economic impact of pandemic.

Just one example of how damaging the forces of profit are, to human progress.

In the end, all politics are all about profit.

The project is shelved for now, maybe some others are pursuing it or even using the technology it aspired to, maybe not (Some parties might claim they have it, when they don’t, it is an easy thing to fake).