BEACH bums in Hawaii will be blissfully unaware, but soon a flying saucer will loom above their heads. NASA is gearing up to conduct the first test flight of a disc-shaped craft designed to safely land heavy loads, and one day people, on Mars.
In June, the prosaically named Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) will be lofted into the stratosphere from a US navy facility on the island of Kauai. The inflatable saucer is intended to help slow down vehicles after they enter the Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds.
Until recently, NASA used airbags and parachutes to land on Mars. But the heavier the load, the harder it is to come in softly. For the car-sized Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012, NASA invented the sky crane, which combines parachutes with a rocket-powered landing gear. A human mission, however, could weigh 100 tonnes – too heavy for the crane.
Enter the LDSD, which deploys a balloon-like decelerator with an uncanny resemblance to a flying saucer, and a giant parachute twice the size of Curiosity's. When the landing capsule is travelling at about Mach 3.5, the flying saucer would rapidly inflate like a Hawaiian pufferfish to increase surface area. The added air resistance would slow the capsule to Mach 2, prompting the parachute to deploy.
To simulate Mars's thin atmosphere on Earth, the team in Hawaii will first lift a test vehicle fitted with the LDSD system to about 37 kilometres above the Pacific Ocean using a high-altitude balloon. The craft will detach and fire a small rocket to reach a height of 55 kilometres. As it falls back to Earth, the system should inflate and moments later the parachute will fire. The saucer should splash down in the sea.
In addition to landing people on Mars, the system could help robotic craft safely land in Martian mountains. These areas have even thinner air and so have been inaccessible with current technology.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Flying saucer will land people safely on Mars"
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