Advertisement

NASA's flying saucer tests Mars landing technology

NASA's "flying saucer" had a second test flight today to test technology that will help us land heavy loads – and eventually people – on Mars.

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) was launched via balloon this afternoon. It was meant to test two braking technologies that will help slow the 3.2-tonne, 4.7-metre wide vehicle down from supersonic speeds.

The new technologies tested include:

- Supersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerators (SIADs), balloon-like devices that inflate around the vehicle to help slow it down to about 2.4 times the speed of sound.

- A supersonic ringsail parachute — a parachute 30.5 metres in diameter (larger than the infield of a baseball diamond) that will slow it down further prior to splashdown.

NASA said the SIAD deployed and inflated, and that the chute deployed but did not inflate — the same results that a similar test had last year.

"We'll study data from this test to learn and improve," NASA tweeted.

So far, NASA has used parachute technology designed in the 1970s to decelerate and land things on Mars, most recently the 899-kilogram Curiosity rover in 2012.

But sending humans to Mars will require much heavier loads than the 1.5-tonne maximum that the traditional parachute technology allows Supplies needed to construct safe living quarters and rockets that will allow them to return to Earth could weigh several tonnes.

NASA says slowing down spacecraft in Mars's atmosphere is tricky. You can't use rockets to land the way you do on the moon because Mars's atmosphere is too thick. But you can't use friction and parachutes to land the way you do on Earth, because Mars's atmosphere is too thin.