Why landing astronauts on Mars suddenly looks harder than ever before
On Monday, June 8, NASA tested their low-density supersonic decelerator (LDSD) spacecraft, which looks exactly like a flying saucer. The test took place off the coast of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii.
NASA is using this
spacecraft to develop the technology necessary to one day transport
astronauts to the surface of Mars. But Monday's test showed that
engineers still have a ways to go and a lot to learn before they're
ready for such a task.
You could say that every second of Monday's test led up to a critical
moment: When the spacecraft deployed its supersonic parachute.
This parachute is the largest
parachute ever designed for a spacecraft — it could cover an entire
American football field — and its purpose is to slow the vehicle down so
that NASA knows how also to slow future, astronaut-carrying spacecraft
so it doesn't crash into the Martian surface, killing the humans inside.
Unfortunately, Monday's test failed to achieve what it set out to do: keep the parachute intact.
When NASA first tested LDSD last
year, everything went according to plan except the parachute. Within
seconds of deployment, the chute shredded to pieces (see the GIF below).
Over the last year, the LDSD team has examined what they think went
wrong and redesigned a brand new chute that they were sure would do the
job this time.
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NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on YouTube
"We think we have it, but it will be the visuals LDSD brings
back that will tell the tale," Ian Clark, principal investigator of
LDSD from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said
in a NASA statement
just a week before the Monday's test flight. "As long as our chute open
to the point where the canopy is fully inflated, and I think we will do
that, we will have learned something valuable."
Unfortunately,
the same thing happened this time — the parachute shredded apart. This
is the best footage we have at the moment of what happened. The footage
was taken by a camera on board the vehicle:
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NASA
Now, it's back to the
drawing board, but how NASA is going to fix this outstanding problem of
the pesky parachute is not clear. NASA isn't giving up though: They've
scheduled a third test flight of the LDSD for the summer of 2016.
