JPL Shows Off Flying Saucer-Shaped Breakthrough

 

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) debuted a saucer-shaped test vehicle that brings technology one-step closer to reaching President Obama’s goal of sending humans to Mars by 2030 at a special viewing on Wednesday.

Assembled inside a JPL clean room, the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will launch a rocket-powered, lightweight drag device into the atmosphere on June 3 from the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility located on Kauai, Hawaii.

That mission will test “breakthrough technologies” that could replace a system that has been in place since 1972 for the Viking’s land on Mars. The technologies will need to enable large equipment, up to 40,000 tons, to land safely on the surface of Mars.

“We’ve been pushing the envelope of what we can squeeze out of that 1972 data and were pretty much there, were at the limit. We want to go bigger. We want to land a two story thing on Mars someday, we don’t yet know how to do that,” Mission Manager Mark Adler said.

In order to safely land a spacecraft the size of a two-story condominium, the parachute system that still worked for the Curiosity Mars rover in 2012 will need to be updated. Curiosity could be compared to the size of a Hummer at one metric ton, considerably smaller than the condo-size necessary for human life, and the heavier the object, the faster the object flies through the thin atmosphere of Mars.

The result is a crash landing onto the planet if good resistance devices are not in place. The LDSD project has developed two inflatable drag devices and a new supersonic parachute that will allow those larger object landings and access to more of the planet’s surface.

For the upcoming test, the vehicle will be launched by a balloon and accelerated to 180,000 feet until it travels at four times the speed of sound to replicate a comparable atmosphere to Mars. The launched device will land in the ocean where it will be retrieved by two ships.

“Parachutes are wonderful efficient devices, very light weight and can generate enormous amounts of drag. Were building a parachute to have 2.5 times the drag capability of anything we’ve ever used in mars. It will be able to be deployed much higher than before at Mars,” Principal Investigator Ian Clark said.

The vehicle increases in diameter from 4.7 meters to 15 feet, up to 6 meters, once it inflates after the launch to give it extra drag.

NASA will conduct these full-scale, stratospheric tests high above Earth to prove their value for future missions to Mars. Once tested, the devices will enable missions that maximize the capability of current launch vehicles, and could be used in Mars missions launching as early as 2018.

A feat like this takes hundreds of scientist’s brainpower as well as several corporations collaborating to find the technology. The team at JPL has invested years into previous parachute launches and reworking of the technology to test these resistance creating vehicles.

“I’m just excited about seeing a culmination of the last 3 or 4 years of my life, all the late nights and stressful reviews and problems, and fires that we put out; seeing those all reach the crescendo with a successful test. I know that all our hard work is worth the data,” Lead Engineer Brant Cook said.

Oook will be greeting the vehicle on the other side once it lands in the ocean and he drags it out to collect the data. Cook said the success of the project is ultimately seeing if the way of testing the technology works, but said the team can learn more from failures than successes.

More testing will be done in the summer of 2015 with similar technologies that will lead the way for bigger missions to Mars to take place.