There's something in the mission for ULA, too. During the descent, it will eject a data recorder storing information about the flight that a boat will retrieve from the water. The inflated system will then separate and splash down into the Pacific Ocean with a parachute near Hawaii. If all goes according to plan, the heat shield will slow down the LOFTID vehicle from over 25 times the speed of sound to under 610 mph. The rocket will take off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The $93 million mission is a partnership with United Launch Alliance, which will provide the ride and the recovery of the NASA equipment after the launch. That's what you have to have."Ī demonstration mission for the inflatable heat shield will launch in November. "With 20 to 40 metric tons, we're talking about a ranch house, fully furnished with a car in the carport. That's the equivalent of a well-instrumented golf cart," Del Corso told Mashable. "With classic technology, you can land about 1.5 metric tons. It's a more realistic solution than bundles of parachutes the size of football fields or tens of extra tons of rocket fuel, the experts said. The idea is to deploy it higher up in Mars' atmosphere, expanding NASA's touchdown options throughout the Martian southern highlands. Its synthetic material is 15 times stronger than steel and able to withstand temperatures over 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit. The system is composed of a stack of inner-tube-like rings strapped together.
A NASA prototype could save the lives of firefighters as blazes erupt in western U.S.6 things to know about NASA's moon-bound megarocket.NASA's monstrous moon rocket is an overpriced, political beast.Why landing a spaceship on the moon is still so challenging.Reliance on the old method has also constrained spacecraft landings to Mars' northern lowlands, below the base elevation level on the Red Planet, said Joe Del Corso, the project manager at Langley. So far, they've only landed less than two tons on the Martian ground. For sending astronauts to Mars, scientists say they'll need to land about 20 to 45 tons. The larger the aeroshell, though, the heavier the loads can be. A hard aeroshell can only be as big as the diameter of a rocket's nose cone, which holds the lander. The aeroshell is a protective cover, shielding the lander from the scorching heat of reentry.įrom the first crewless Viking mission in the 1970s to NASA's most recent Curiosity rover launched in 2011, engineers have used the same heat shield technology to get to Mars.īut the classic technology is limiting. Since NASA began in 1958, the agency has relied on rocket engines and rigid aeroshell heat shields to land spacecraft. NASA Langley researchers demonstrate the inflation of a heat shield for the final time on Earth before it undergoes a test in space this November. The contraption was 20-feet-wide, about the size of a small carousel, with a catwalk stretched overtop for scientists and engineers to cross it. The heat shield will stay put until after the satellite's delivery, then will inflate as the spacecraft returns to Earth.Īt a small demo on Wednesday, the gunmetal-gray-shrouded heat shield, looking like a giant mushroom cap, ballooned out in a cavernous laboratory. The mission, known as the Bernard Kutter Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator - LOFTID for short - will take the experiment up with a weather satellite on a trip around Earth that passes over the North and South poles. Earlier this week, scientists and engineers gathered to see the heat shield inflated for the final time on Earth before it shoots into orbit on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in November.
Now a team at the space agency's Langley Research Center in Virginia is ready to test its mettle in space. Called a Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, or HIAD, the technology could help NASA land astronauts and massive cargo loads on the Red Planet in the late 2030s.
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Mars' sky gets a mysterious green aurora resembling a giant wormīut space scientists think they've figured out how to pull more drag out of literal thin air.Įngineers have developed new hardware - an inflatable heat shield - that might be the key.