NASA will launch a massive inflatable heat shield shaped like a flying saucer into space this week

If humans are ever to land safely on Mars, engineers are going to have to invent a spacecraft that can slow down enough to survive atmospheric entry.

Known as the “seven minutes of terror”, in 2021 NASA’s Perseverance rover emerged unscathed after making its descent to the Red Planet using a basic parachute.

But the landing process is trickier for larger payloads, such as rockets with humans on board.

Fortunately, the US space agency may have a solution to the problem, in the form of a large inflatable flying saucer-like heat shield that will be launched into low Earth orbit this week.

Once there, the Low Earth Orbit Inflatable Decelerator Flight Test (LOFTID) will inflate before descending back to Earth.

NASA hopes the test will demonstrate how the heat shield can act as a giant brake to slow down a future Mars spacecraft.

The technology is set to launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on Wednesday (November 9) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, alongside a polar-orbiting weather satellite JPSS-2.

Once JPSS-2 reaches orbit, the heat shield will inflate and be placed on a reentry trajectory from low Earth orbit to test its ability to slow down and survive reentry.

If the test is successful, it could prove crucial in helping NASA achieve its ambitious goal of launching humans to the Red Planet within the next decade.

“This technology could support landing crew and large robotic missions on Mars, as well as returning heavier payloads to Earth,” the US space agency added.

When it comes to destinations with atmospheres – including Mars, Venus, Titan and Earth – one of the main challenges NASA faces is how to deliver heavy payloads.

As it stands, current hard aeroshells are limited by the size of a rocket’s fairing – its streamlined protective covering.

For example, you might remember the “seven minutes of terror” when NASA’s Perseverance rover used a parachute to descend to the Martian surface last year.

Radio signals sent from NASA and vice versa take 10 minutes for either party to make contact, so after the ground crew told Perseverance to descend, the rover took over and did the epic journey completely alone.

The spacecraft passed through Mars’ atmosphere traveling at 12,000 miles per hour, but then had to slow to zero miles per hour seven minutes later in order to land safely on the surface.

When a spacecraft enters an atmosphere, aerodynamic drag helps slow it down.

However, Mars’ atmosphere is much less dense than Earth’s, which presents an extreme challenge for aerodynamic deceleration.

“The atmosphere is thick enough to provide some drag, but too thin to decelerate the spacecraft as quickly as it would in Earth’s atmosphere,” NASA explained.

The agency’s solution to this problem is a 20-foot-wide heat shield that would be deployed high in the atmosphere, allowing a spacecraft to decelerate early while experiencing less intense heating.

It will become the largest blunt-body aeroshell to ever fly through the atmosphere in this week’s test.

After delivery of the main payload, the polar-orbiting weather satellite LOFTID will be released to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.

It will decelerate from hypersonic, more than 25 times faster than the speed of sound, to subsonic flight, at less than 609 miles per hour.

Throughout the flight, a real-time beacon periodically transmits limited data while the sensors and cameras acquire a more comprehensive data set which is stored on an internal data recorder and an ejectable data recorder which is jettisoned and retrieved after the start of the school year.

LOFTID will deploy a parachute to allow a gentle fall and be recovered from the Pacific Ocean.

NASA said the demonstration is set to “revolutionize” the way it delivers payloads to planetary destinations with atmospheres.

He added that inflatable decelerator technology is scalable for manned robotic missions and large missions to Mars.