NASA Tests Supersonic Parachute to Land the Mars Rover and Breaks World Record

Watch as NASA  tests a new parachute for landing the Mars 2020 rover on the Red Planet. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE) project conducted a series of sounding rocket tests to help decide which parachute design to use on the Mars 2020 mission. On September 7, 2018, NASA’s ASPIRE project broke a world record when its rocket-launched parachute deployed in 4-10ths of a second — the fastest inflation of this size parachute in history. It created a peak load of almost 70,000 pounds of force.

Transcript

00:00:01 Testing a Parachute for Mars Fifty years ago NASA began lofting parachutes to altitudes and speeds meant to simulate the conditions of Mars entry. Those early tests demonstrated the challenges of inflating lightweight materials in a 1500 mile an hour wind and having them survive well enough to help enable a safe landing on the Red Planet. Today, as our missions become ever more daring, we need new parachutes capable of surviving

00:00:26 those strenuous environments. And we need ways of testing them at loads higher than ever before. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked with NASA's Wallops Flight Facility to develop a new test technique. The Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment, or ASPIRE project, uses a 2-stage Black Brant 9 sounding rocket to carry its payload to the conditions needed

00:00:48 to stress the parachute. The rocket is launched out over the Atlantic Ocean and ascends to altitudes where the atmopsphere of Earth mimics the atmosphere near the surface of Mars. The third and final ASPIRE test launched on September 7. The parachute was deployed at nearly twice the speed of sound. In less than half a second, 200 pounds of nylon, Kevlar, and Technora go from a small, drum-sized bag with the density of wood to an inflated parachute with the volume of a large house,

00:01:15 generating nearly 70,000 pounds of drag. In slow motion images, you can see the rapid emergence of the parachute, as it begins generating the drag crucial for deceleration at Mars. These images give us amazing insights into the physics and early behaviors of a supersonic parachute inflation. The apparent ease of the unfolding and unfurling in the parachute belies the severity of the extreme environment in which this occurs.

00:01:40 After three successful tests of ASPIRE, NASA has now tested their new parachute at loads and conditions exceeding any large supersonic parachute before it, and 40% higher than the highest load expected for the Mars 2020 mission. Our parachute is now certified for flight at Mars! NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology