Landing on Mars is hard . Gravity barely a third that of Earth ’s helps , but without oceans to splosh down in or much in the way of an atmosphere to slacken a spacecraft thing get tough . As a resolution , engineers have spent a raft of time trying to do up with design that will allow missions to touch down gently .
The best way to quiz these is to take the vehicles to meridian where the atmosphere is as thin as that on the ruddy planet . Footage from the late effort is pretty awing .
While the parachute ’s functioning was disappointing , the results for the craft itself were more supporting . " Our test vehicle performed as advertised , " said NASA ’s Ian Clark . " The SIAD [ Supersoinic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerators ] and ballute , which draw out the parachute , also performed beyond expectations . We also got significant perceptivity into the fundamental aperient of parachute inflation . We are literally rewriting the books on high - speed parachute surgical operation , and we are doing it a twelvemonth in front of docket . "
" There ’s a stack of physic to this trouble that we ’re now realise raw insights into that we ’ve never had before , and we ’re learning more about what it takes to construct parachutes this size of it that can be safely deployed at these conditions , " Clark pronounce . " We ’re going to take all of that knowledge and feed it back to our flight of steps for next yr . "
The Moon landing had to be done without an atmosphere at all , which meant using a lot of fuel , even with the light lunar gravity . Carrying that much fuel to Mars would be hugely expensive . Since the Viking Program NASA has been using chute to slack landers down . Asthey note , this has been used successfully as recently as 2012 withCuriosity . Nevertheless , as projects get more complex , and therefore heavier , it becomes harder and harder for parachute to do what is needed on their own . If the foxiness is carrying masses , the scale leaf of the problem grows dramatically .
Currently under development are two types of SIAD that aim to slow the trade from Mach 3.5 to less than Mach 2 and a chute that will reduce the focal ratio to subsonic levels . If successful these will admit NASA to double the payload it can deliver to Mars from the current 1.5 MT .
ViaSpace.com
