NASA will launch a huge flying saucer-like inflatable heat shield into space this week

If humans are to one day land safely on Mars, engineers will need to invent a spacecraft that can slow down enough to survive atmospheric entry.

Known as “the seven minutes of terror,” in 2021 NASA’s Perseverance rover emerged unscathed after making its descent to the Red Planet with a rudimentary parachute.

But the landing process is more difficult for larger payloads, such as rockets with people on board.

Thankfully, the US space agency may have a solution to the problem, in the form of a large flying saucer-like inflatable heat shield that will be launched into low Earth orbit this week.

Once there, the Low Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) will inflate before descending to Earth.

NASA hopes the test will show how the heat shield can act as a giant brake to slow down a future Mars spacecraft.

The technology is scheduled to launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on Wednesday (Nov. 9) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, along with a JPSS-2 weather satellite orbiting the pole.

When JPSS-2 reaches orbit, the heat shield will be inflated and put on a low-orbit re-entry trajectory to test its ability to slow down and survive re-entry.

If the test is a success, it could prove crucial in helping NASA achieve its ambitious goal of launching humans to the Red Planet within the next decade.

“This technology can support landing crews and large robotic missions on Mars, as well as returning heavier payloads to Earth,” the US space agency added.

When it comes to destinations with atmospheres—including Mars, Venus, Titan, and Earth—one of the most important challenges NASA faces is how to deliver heavy payloads.

As it stands, current rigid aeroshells are limited by the size of a rocket’s envelope – its streamlined protective envelope.

For example, you may remember the “seven minutes of terror” when NASA’s Perseverance rover used a parachute to descend to the surface of Mars last year.

Radio signals sent from NASA and vice versa take 10 minutes for either party to make contact, so after the ground team told Perseverance to descend, the rover took over and made the epic journey all by itself.

The spacecraft shot through Mars’ atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour, but then had to slow to zero miles per hour seven minutes later to land safely on the surface.

When a spacecraft enters an atmosphere, aerodynamic drag helps slow it down.

However, Mars’ atmosphere is much less dense than Earth’s, which presents an extreme challenge for aerodynamic deceleration.

“The atmosphere is thick enough to provide some drag, but too thin to slow the spacecraft down as quickly as it would in Earth’s atmosphere,” NASA explained.

The agency’s solution to this problem is a 20-foot-wide heat shield that would be deployed in the upper atmosphere, allowing a spacecraft to decelerate early while experiencing less intense heating.

It will be the largest blunt-body aeroshell ever to undergo atmospheric entry during this week’s test.

After delivery of the primary payload, the polar weather satellite, LOFTID, LOFTID will be released to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere.

It will decelerate from hypersonic, more than 25 times the speed of sound, down to subsonic flight, less than 609 miles per hour.

Throughout the flight, a real-time beacon periodically transmits limited data while sensors and cameras acquire a more extensive data set that is stored on an internal data recorder and an ejectable data recorder that is ejected and recovered after re-entry.

LOFTID will deploy a parachute to allow a soft splash and will be retrieved from the Pacific Ocean.

NASA said the demonstration is poised to “revolutionize” how it delivers payloads to planetary destinations with atmospheres.

It added that the inflatable decelerator technology is scalable for both crewed and large robotic missions to Mars.