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

If humans are to one day land safely on Mars, engineers will 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 rudimentary parachute.

But the landing process is more difficult for larger payloads, such as rockets with people on board.

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

Once there, the low earth orbit flight test of an inflatable decelerator (LOFTID) will inflate, before descending back to Earth.

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

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

Once JPSS-2 reaches orbit, the heat shield will inflate and be re-entered from low-Earth orbit to test its ability to slow down and survive re-entry.

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

“This technology could support crew landing and large robotic missions to Mars, as well as the return of 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 key challenges facing NASA is how to deliver heavy payloads.

As it stands, current rigid airfoils are limited by the size of a missile’s fairing – its enhanced shielding.

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

Radio signals sent from NASA and back take 10 minutes for each part to make contact, so after the ground team told Perseverance to descend, the rover took over and made the epic journey all by itself.

The spacecraft blasted through the Martian atmosphere traveling at 12,000 miles per hour, but then had to slow to zero miles per hour seven minutes later to land safely on the surface.

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

However, the Martian 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 slow 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 in the upper atmosphere, allowing a spacecraft to decelerate early while experiencing less intense heating.

It will become the largest blunt-body airframe ever to pass through atmospheric entry during 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 slow from supersonic, more than 25 times the speed of sound, to subsonic flight, 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 that is stored on an internal data recorder and an ejectable data recorder that is discarded and retrieved after the reintroduction.

LOFTID will deploy a parachute to allow for a soft launch and recovery from the Pacific Ocean.

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

He added that the inflatable decelerator technology is scalable to both crewed and large robotic missions to Mars.