Smarter Parachutes Tested for Mars Landings

NASA is taking parachute tech to new heights! As part of their mission to make Mars landings safer and smarter, researchers are testing innovative sensors and bonding techniques on supersonic parachutes using drones. In a project dubbed Enhancing Parachutes by Instrumenting the Canopy, the team completed five successful test flights on June 4, 2025, at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California—bringing us one step closer to smoother landings on the Red Planet.

Transcript

00:00:01 inaudible Okay, that's 300. Photo-Video You guys good? Ready Release in three, two, one release. Oh, that's coming down quick. I think the wire is probably good. I think everything held up like it's supposed to. Yeah. That's what I thought was going gonna break.

00:00:38 Didn't break. Look at that. Yeah. ...the sensor is still on. So no longer wanted to be attached. Yeah. Look at the strain relief still in there? There's no load on the... No loads on the wires. The strain relief here. Still good. Take a picture of this. So earlier, EPIC has been focusing on

00:01:00 finding ways to bond a sensor to the parachute fabric and what it is leading to today is, where we're actually doing a drop test with a an instrumented parachute canopy with a sensor bonded to it. Okay. How do you want this? Mark! Chill right there for a minute. Okay. Here we go. Three. Two. One.

00:01:50 Release. So what we're looking for in order to measure success is, we've attached GoPros to the capsule and to the Alta X, and, we're going to be doing a cross-sectional analysis of the video footage to make sure that the sensor, when deployed, does not have any impact to the the deployment of the canopy. Yeah. Okay. Oh. That's gnarly.

00:02:21 Yeah baby.