Testing for Mars

IMAGINE your body floating weightlessly through space – a slight push and pull would allow you to easily change speed and direction.

Now, imagine having to send a 3 310kg spacecraft racing through Mars’s atmosphere at 19 310km/h. How would you safely land it on the Red Planet?

It turns out, with a lot of trial and error involving basic materials, such as nylon, that you can find in a fabric store. “A lot of the times when we fail our parachutes (during testing), they failed spectacularly. I mean, it’s like you’re creating a confetti machine of nylon,” said Ian Clark, a Nasa investigator in charge of testing Martian conditions.

Clark’s team is part of the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (Aspire), a project within Nasa’s Mars 2020 mission to search for evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet. The main goal of Aspire is to make sure a rover is able to successfully land on Mars. The Curiosity rover that Nasa landed on Mars in 2012 weighed less than the 2020 rover, so the team has to account for the heavier vehicle. The key improvement to the upcoming mission is ensuring the nylon on the parachute is stronger and lighter.

The final drift on to the surface of Mars requires a parachute to cut through its challenging atmosphere.

The team is getting ready for their next test on March 27, when a vehicle – matching the weight of the rover – attached to a parachute will be detached from a rocket over the Atlantic Ocean. Clark said after each test “we look over every square [centimetre] of the parachute. We want to see: Were some of the stitches popping? Kind of like you’ve seen stitches failing on your jeans or T-shirt”.

One challenge with testing a parachute on earth is that the speed of sound here is faster than on Mars. Sound causes drag, or resistance, on objects in flight. And scientists don’t have a way to slow down sound. “It means it’s probably going to... inflate faster at earth than it would at Mars, and it could be more stressing,” Clark said. – The Washington Post