In just six days, NASA took two big steps to put boots on Mars.
The agency’s Artemis 1 mission launched on Wednesday morning (Nov. 16), sending an uncrewed Orion capsule toward the moon on a huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
NASA is counting on SLS and Orion to help the agency establish a lunar base in the late 2020s, a key priority of the Artemis program. And, if all goes according to plan, the two vehicles will also enable even more ambitious feats, helping astronauts reach Mars in the late 2030s or early 2040s.
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Last week, on November 10, NASA tested the hardware that could help these manned missions to Mars land safely: an inflatable heat shield called LOFTID, which was launched into Earth orbit with the weather satellite JPSS-2 and then returned to Earth. LOFTID survived its return trip in great shape, suggesting the technology has great potential to help land heavy hardware on Mars, team members said.
“The demonstration was a huge success,” said Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, during a press conference Thursday (Nov. 17).
“We now have the ability to put heavy payloads into space and bring them back down,” he added. “These two achievements are big steps in enabling human access and exploration. We’re going to space and we want to be able to stay there.”
LOFTID (short for “Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator”) is an inflatable heat shield designed to slow the descent of a payload through a planetary atmosphere by drag.
NASA sees this strategy as promising for its manned Mars plans, which will require landing large payloads such as habitat modules on the Red Planet. This equipment could tip the scales at 20 tons or so, too heavy for current Mars entry, descent and landing systems.
NASA’s 1-ton Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, for example, made practical use of the rocket-powered cellular crane method that lowered them safely through the red planet’s thin air, agency officials said. (Parachutes were also part of the landings of these rovers, as they would be with an inflatable heat shield landing system).
Last week’s launch offered an ambitious test of this technology. LOFTID was launched in a compact configuration with JPSS-2 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. After deploying from the Centaur upper stage of the Atlas V, LOFTID expanded to its full diameter of about 6 meters, was positioned for the return of the Earth and made the step.
Initial inspections, conducted after removing the heat shield from the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii, suggested that LOFTID passed the test with flying colors. And another week of analysis has only strengthened this conclusion.
“The vehicle looks beautiful. It looks flawless, and I really can’t say it enough,” Del Corso said. “I was surprised how good, how good the vehicle was.”
Scientists and engineers will continue to analyze the data for another year to gain a full understanding of the test flight, LOFTID team members said.
The LOFTID project, which cost a total of $93 million over five years, is not, however, the final step in Mars’ inflatable heat shields.
A structure about three to four times wider than LOFTID would probably be needed to get a large payload like a habitat module safely to the Red Planet, project team members said. Expanding the technology so dramatically poses a number of challenges, which scientists and engineers can now begin to seriously assess after LOFTID’s successful flight.
“There is some work that needs to be done with this [scaling up]; there are facility considerations that need to be taken into account,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, during Thursday’s briefing.
“But the roadmap will guide us in that and our future investments in that,” he added. “We’re looking at that now, and really the near-term future for that. So yes, that would be the next step for that capability.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).