Technology that could help humanity land heavy hardware on Mars will be tested in space early next week.
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V The rocket is expected to launch the Joint Polar Surveyor System-2 (JPSS-2) weather satellite from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base early Tuesday morning (November 1).
JPSS-2 – a U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration craft that will help researchers improve weather forecasts and monitor the impacts of climate changeamong other tasks – is not the only payload aboard the Atlas V. Also on Tuesday, the flight test in low Earth orbit of an inflatable deceleration device (LOFTID), a technology demonstrator whose applications could s expand beyond our home planet.
Related: New powerful JPSS-2 Earth monitoring satellite to study weather ‘butterfly effect’
A new type of landing gear
LOFTID is an expandable aeroshell, a type of heat shield that engineers envision for missions to the Red Planet. The thin Martian atmosphere makes landing tricky; incoming spacecraft encounter some drag, but not as much as they feel in Earth’s air.
It therefore takes more than parachutes to deposit payloads safely on March. Spirit and the size of a NASA golf cart Opportunity rovers, for example, also used inflatable airbags that cushioned their fall. And the agency has developed a rocket powered celestial crane unleash his curiosity and Perseverance rovers, both of which are about the size of an SUV and weigh around 1 tonne (here on Earth, anyway; they’re lighter on Mars, where surface gravity is only 40% stronger than that of our planet).
However, these missions pretty much exceeded the weight limits of the Sky Crane. New entry, descent and landing technologies will be needed to get super-heavy payloads — habitat pods for a future research base, for example — safely to Mars, science officials stressed. Nasa.
Stretchable aeroshells are a possible solution. These saucer-shaped structures are designed to compress enough to be launched aboard conventional rockets. But they inflate considerably upon arrival at their planetary destination, potentially providing enough atmospheric drag to help land much more massive objects than Perseverance or Curiosity. (Decelerators aren’t the complete answer; parachutes would still be part of the plan, too.)
The $93 million LOFTID project started just five years ago, but the basic idea goes way back.
“The original concept actually comes from the 50s and 60s,” Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, said at a press conference earlier this month. “Unfortunately, during that time, they didn’t have the materials or the structures; they weren’t advanced enough to actually realize the capability.”
NASA has conducted ground and atmospheric tests with expandable airbombs, including a 2015 test that carried one into the skies over Hawaii aboard a giant balloon. (This test, however, did not go as planned; the supersonic parachute attached to the aeroshell torn during the descent.)
But LOFTID will take testing to a new level.
“This is the first low Earth orbit flight test of this technology and the largest-scale test article to date,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations at the Space Technology Missions Directorate. of NASA, during the press conference.
Related: To land safely on Mars, go straight and fly right
The flight plan
LOFTID is securely packaged in a bag that is 7.4 feet high and 4.3 feet wide (2.3 by 1.3 meters). It is found under JPSS-2 on the Centaur upper stage of Atlas V.
The Centaur will deploy JPSS-2 into a sun-synchronous polar orbit about 28 minutes after liftoff on Tuesday, then head to a re-entry trajectory. Seventy-five minutes into the flight, the Centaur will release LOFTID, which will descend back to Earth.
The aeroshell will have reached its full width of 19.7 feet (6 m) at this point. LOFTID will pass through our atmosphere, experiencing maximum temperatures of around 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius) before deploying parachutes and gently crashing into the Pacific Ocean near the Hawaiian Islands.
Mission team members will delve into the data collected by LOFTID on the way down, using it to complement their understanding of the capabilities and potential of stretchable aeroshells. That potential is intriguing, and it’s not limited to Red Planet missions, Kortes said.
“This technology may ultimately enable new missions for us to Mars. [and] Venus; even Saturn’s largest moon, Titanbecomes a possibility because of the density of the atmosphere there,” she said. “And it can also be used for payload returns to Earth.”
ULA is particularly interested in this angle of return to Earth. The launch company is partnering with NASA on LOFTID, under an unfunded Space Act agreement, as it wants to evaluate the possible use of decelerators on missions in its future. Rocket Vulcan Centaurthe successor to the Atlas V.
ULA wants to reuse the blue origin The BE-4 engines that power Vulcan Centaur’s first stage and expandable aeroshells like LOFTID could be a good way to bring this precious hardware safely back to Earth.
“All the data we get from the LOFTID mission will be used to help correlate the models and gain a much better understanding of what the Vulcan reuse system will be up against,” said James Cusin, operations engineer in the advanced ULA programs, said in a press release (opens in a new tab).
Mike Wall is the author of “The low (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) Or on Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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