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NASA has successfully tested a supersonic parachute designed to land the agency's next rover on Mars (Sept. 7) during a rocket flight from Wallops Island, Virginia.
The suborbital launch was designed to mimic the conditions the parachute might encounter when landing on Mars, and then allow engineers to study the parachute and data collected during the flight to ensure that the system will function as intended.
"It's really a resistance test of this March 2020 design," said Jeremy Hill, mechanical engineer at JPL, during a webcast launch. "We want to be closer to the Martian environment." [NASA’s Mars Rover 2020 Mission in Pictures (Gallery)]
The launch of the rocket probe and the deployment of the parachute on September 7, 2018 went well. Credit: NASA / Allison Stancil
Or rather, the team wants to put the parachute in even more difficult conditions than the ones it expects on Mars, with a launch of more than 40% higher than what the team is doing. waiting to see during a real deployment. Hill said.
The launch this morning was part of NASA's Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research (ASPIRE) experiment. The program builds parachutes capable of hanging well enough in the thin atmosphere of the planet to buffer robotic landings, particularly that of NASA's March 2020 rover, which is scheduled to launch this year.
The parachute was deployed gently about 2 minutes after launching the two-stage rocket. NASA made sure that the boats were ready in the Atlantic Ocean to retrieve the parachute after the flight and was delighted to see calm seas this morning.
The launch of the rocket probe and the deployment of the parachute, on September 7, 2018, went well.
Credit: NASA / Jamie Adkins
But this parachute is not the one you may have seen used by paratroopers. The Martian atmosphere being so thin, the parachute must be 10 to 20 times larger than the land parachutes to protect the vehicle during a landing.
The parachute itself weighs 90 pounds (90 pounds) and is so tight that it is denser than hardwood, Hill said. Once deployed, it unfolds from the size of a barrel to the size of a house in less than half a second. It's this incredibly fast deployment that makes ASPIRE a supersonic parachute.
After this morning's launch, the parachute will be released from the Atlantic Ocean and brought back for study by the engineers to make sure that the device has worked as intended and has not shown any signs of weakness during the extreme test. Hill explained that there were more than one million stitches in the parachute, made in part from Kevlar, and that the team wanted to consider each of them for their own sake. Make sure that the landing of March 2020 would run smoothly.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her @meghanbartels. follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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