The great canopy that helped promote perseverance Mars proved here on Earth at NASAWallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Test. Test again. Test again.
Testing spacecraft parts before they take flight is critical to a successful mission.
You rarely get over with a spaceship after it launches, especially the ones heading into another planet. You have to do everything to get it right the first time.
Three successful sound rocket missions from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in 2017 and 2018 to test a supersonic parachute proved their worth by successfully completing a Sustainability mission on the Red Planet.
After traveling 293 million miles (472 million kilometers), the supersonic parachutes, designed to bring the rover’s descent to the surface of the planet, were successfully deployed and augmented. They made the smooth movement of Perseverance possible.
The rescue platform that holds NASA’s Perseverance movement falling through the Martian atmosphere can be seen in this image taken on February 18, 2021 with the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. An ellipse marks where perseverance occurred. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
This mission required us to design and build a 72-foot parachute that could survive the Mach 2 wind in about half a second. This is an incredible engineering challenge, but one that was absolutely essential for the mission, ”said Ian Clark, test technical director from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “To make sure they were working at Mars under these difficult conditions, we first had to test our parachute designs here at Earth. By repeating a Martian environment we needed our payload halfway to the edge of space and to go twice as fast as sound. Sound rockets were essential to our test and eventually to land on Mars. ”
Watch as NASA tests a new parachute to land a Mars 2020 rover on the Red Planet. On September 7, NASA’s ASPIRE project broke a record when its rocket-powered parachute launched in 4-10ths of a second – the fastest inflation of this magnitude in history .
A NASA team tested the parachute three times in Mars-related conditions, using Black Brant IX sound rockets. The cute’s latest test trip reached a 67,000-pound (300,000-Newton) cargo – the highest ever reached by a supersonic parachute and about 85% higher than expected to meet a bark the mission when deployed in the Mars atmosphere.
“When the spacecraft was successful last week, it was a real achievement for the parachute test team,” said Giovanni Rosanova, head of NASA’s Sounding Rockets Program Office at Wallops. “Putting the test part in the right conditions with an acoustic rocket was challenging, and the importance of the tests to the success of the Mars landing was an inspiring team. We are proud to be part of this mission. “
Suborbital vehicles – acoustic rockets, scientific balloons, and aircraft – are great platforms for developing and testing spacecraft instruments and parts. Spacecraft including Terra, Aqua, COBE, CGRO, SPITZER, SWIFT, HST, SOHO, and STEREO has a tradition of suborbital vehicle missions.
This annotated image was taken with a parachute-look camera aboard the protective rear shell of NASA’s Perseverance rover as it descended towards Mars’ Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021. Using binary code, two messages were encoded in the parachute: DARE MIGHTY THINGS and GPS coordinates of an area with a JPL visitor center. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Rosanova said, “One of the beauties of suborbital vehicles is that an instrument or its components can be flown, developed, and then re-flown. This can be done within a few years, allowing scientists to work out the lice before they fly in a spaceship. ”
For Mars 2020 paratroopers, the first flight was a test to see if the right conditions could be achieved during the flight to determine what encounters the paratroopers will land through the atmosphere of Mars. The second flight, 6 months later in March 2018, was the first full test of the parachute. The last successful test, conducted in September 2018, provided the results needed for a Sustainability parachute team to be confident that the design was ready for the Mars 2020 mission.
NASA is currently developing plans for a Mars Sample Return mission to retrieve the rocks and earth samples collected by Perseverance and bring them back to Earth. Teams are preparing to test concepts for the Mars Ascent Vehicle that will take the collected samples from the planet’s surface.
Suborbital vehicles – either an acoustic rocket or a scientific balloon – are being tested to test the ascent vehicle. Wallops staff are excited to be part of this next phase of exploring the Red Planet as we approach the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
More about the mission
The main goal of the Perseverance mission on Mars is astrobiology, involving the discovery of signs of microbial old life. The rover will mark the geology of the planet and the climate of the past, pave the way for human study of the Red Planet, and will be the first mission to collect Martian rock and regolith and accumulate (broken rock and dust).
NASA’s subsequent missions, in collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and bring them back to Earth for miniature space. in-depth study.
The Mars 2020 Sustainability mission is part of NASA’s approach to Moon to Mars, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for a human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, builds and manages the Perseverance rover’s operations.