by Technology that could help humanity land heavy material on Mars will be tested in space early next week.
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V The rocket is scheduled to launch the Joint Polar Surveyor System-2 (JPSS-2) weather satellite from California’s Vandenberg Space Base early Tuesday morning (November 1).
JPSS-2 — a US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel that will help researchers improve weather forecasting and monitor its effects climate changeamong other tasks — isn’t the only payload on the Atlas V. Also on Tuesday is the low-Earth orbit flight test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID), a technology demonstrator whose applications could extend beyond our planet.
Related: JPSS-2 Powerful New Earth Observation Satellite to Study Weather ‘Butterfly Effect’
A new type of landing gear
LOFTID is an expandable airfoil, a type of heat shield that engineers are eyeing for missions to the Red Planet. The minute Martian atmosphere makes landing there difficult. Incoming spacecraft encounter some resistance, but not as much as they feel in Earth’s air.
So it takes more than parachutes to safely drop payloads Mars. NASA’s golf cart-sized Spirit and Opportunity The rovers, for example, also used airbags that reduce their fall. And the organization developed a rocket-propelled sky crane to land his Curiosity and Persistence rovers, both are about the size of an SUV and weigh about 1 ton (here on Earth, anyway, they’re lighter on Mars, where surface gravity is only 40% as strong as our planet’s).
However, these missions exceeded the sky crane’s weight limits. New entry, descent and landing technology will be needed to land extremely heavy payloads — habitat modules for a future research base, for example — safely on Mars, NASA officials stressed.
Expandable airfoils are one possible solution. These saucer-like structures are designed to compress tightly enough to launch in conventional rockets. But they swell significantly upon arrival at their planetary destination, potentially providing enough atmospheric drag to help land objects much more massive than Perseverance or Curiosity. (Retarders aren’t the full answer; parachutes would still be part of the plan as well.)
The $93 million LOFTID project started just five years ago, but the core concept goes way back.
“The original idea actually comes from the ’50s and ’60s,” said Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, during 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 really realize the capability.”
NASA has conducted ground and atmospheric tests of expandable airfoils, including a 2015 test that carried one high in the sky over Hawaii in a giant balloon. (This test did not go according to plan, however, the hypersonic parachute was attached to the aircraft disintegrated on 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,” Trudy Cortes, director of technology demonstrations in NASA’s Space Technology Directorate, said during the press conference.
Related: To land safely on Mars, stay straight and fly right
The flight plan
The LOFTID is packed tightly inside a 7.4-foot-tall by 4.3-foot-wide (2.3 by 1.3 meters) bag. It is located below JPSS-2 on the upper stage of Atlas V’s Centaur.
Centaurus will deploy JPSS-2 into a synchronous polar orbit around the sun about 28 minutes after liftoff on Tuesday and then maneuver on a reentry path. Seventy-five minutes into the flight, Centaur will release LOFTID, which will head back to Earth.
The airfoil will have expanded to its full width of 19.7 feet (6 meters) by this point. LOFTID will zip through our atmosphere, peaking at around 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius) before deploying parachutes and gently plunging into the Pacific Ocean near the Hawaiian Islands.
Mission team members will examine the data LOFTID collects on the way down, using it to complete their understanding of the capabilities and capabilities of expandable air pods. That possibility is interesting and not limited to missions to the Red Planet, Cortes said.
“This technology may eventually enable new missions for us to Mars [and] Aphrodite; even Saturn’s largest moon, Titanbecomes a possibility because of the dense atmosphere there,” he 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 working with NASA on LOFTID, under an unfunded Space Act agreement, because it wants to evaluate the possible use of decelerators in its future missions Vulcan Centaur rocketthe successor to the Atlas V.
ULA wants to reuse the Blue Origin BE-4 engines powering Vulcan Centaur’s first stage and expandable airfoils like LOFTID could be a good way to return this precious material safely to Earth.
“All the data we get from the LOFTID mission will be used to help correlate models and gain a much better understanding of what Vulcan’s re-use system will face,” James Cusin, operations engineer in ULA’s Advanced Programs division. he said in a statement (opens in new tab).
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there (opens in 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 new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or up Facebook (opens in new tab).
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