NASA Successfully Tests 'Flying Saucer' Mars Landing Tech

NASA officials over the weekend completed a successful test flight of technologies that are intended to make it easier to land on Mars with larger payloads and, eventually, people.

The space agency on Saturday performed the first of three tests of its new Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD). The weekend flight - conducted off the coast of Hawaii - was intended to test the flying ability of the LDSD test vehicle, but it also deployed two new landing technologies "as a bonus," NASA said. That landing tech will be the focus of the two remaining tests, scheduled for early 2015.

The first of the landing tech is the Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (SIAD), which NASA describes as a "doughnut-shaped" (or flying saucer) deceleration technology. The second is the Supersonic Disk Sail Parachute, a 110-foot parachute that will further slow down the vehicle to safely land on the Martian surface. Unfortunately, the parachute failed to open during the test, but NASA said there is time to figure out what went wrong before next year's test.

"This flight reminds us why NASA takes on hard technical problems, and why we test - to learn and build the tools we will need for the future of space exploration," said Dorothy Rasco, the head deputy associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate. "Technology drives exploration, and [Saturday's] flight is a perfect example of the type of technologies we are developing to explore our solar system."

Landing a vehicle on the Martian surface is a huge undertaking. In fact, the final moments of Curiosity's approach to the Red Planet were dubbed the "7 Minutes of Terror."

Previous missions to Mars used airbags to cushion the landing of the spacecraft. But the Mars Space Laboratory (MSL) and the Curiosity rover weighed about 10 times more than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, so Curiosity used a landing scheme divided into four parts: guided entry, parachute descent, powered descent, and sky crane.

Going forward, spacecraft to Mars will only get heavier, so tools like the LDSD are necessary.

As NASA outlined in its LDSD fact sheet, "landing on Mars is not like landing on Earth, which has a dense atmosphere, or on the moon, which has no atmosphere. Mars has a tricky environment somewhere in-between: it has too much atmosphere to allow rockets alone to land heavy vehicles, as is done on the moon, but too little atmosphere to land vehicles from space purely with friction and parachutes, as is done on Earth."

Parachutes also need to be huge "because the atmosphere is too thin to fill a parachute like those used on Earth." As a result, NASA is conducting its testing in the very thin air found high in Earth's stratosphere because it duplicates many of the most important aspects of Mars' low-density atmosphere.