Why NASA is trying to crash land on Mars

NASA has efficiently touched down on Mars 9 instances, counting on cutting-edge parachutes, huge airbags, and jetpacks to set spacecraft safely on the floor. Now engineers are testing whether or not or not the simplest approach to get to the Martian floor is to crash.

Moderately than gradual a spacecraft’s high-speed descent, an experimental lander design known as SHIELD (Simplified Excessive Impression Vitality Touchdown Machine) would use an accordion-like, collapsible base that acts just like the crumple zone of a automotive and absorbs the vitality of a tough influence.

The brand new design might drastically scale back the price of touchdown on Mars by simplifying the harrowing entry, descent, and touchdown course of and increasing choices for attainable touchdown websites.

“We predict we might go to extra treacherous areas, the place we would not wish to threat making an attempt to put a billion-dollar rover with our present touchdown methods,” stated SHIELD’s undertaking supervisor, Lou Giersch of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Perhaps we might even land a number of of those at totally different difficult-to-access areas to construct a community.”

Automobile crashes, Mars landings

A lot of SHIELD’s design borrows from work completed for NASA’s Mars Pattern Return marketing campaign. Step one in that marketing campaign entails the Perseverance rover amassing rock samples in hermetic metallic tubes; a future spacecraft will carry these samples again to Earth in a small capsule and safely crash land in a abandoned location.

Finding out approaches for that course of led engineers to marvel if the final thought was reversible, stated Velibor Ćormarković, SHIELD staff member at JPL.

“If you wish to land one thing arduous on Earth, why cannot you do it the opposite approach round for Mars?” he stated. “And if we will do a tough touchdown on Mars, we all know SHIELD might work on planets or moons with denser atmospheres.”

To check the idea, engineers wanted to show SHIELD can defend delicate electronics throughout touchdown. The staff used a drop tower at JPL to check how Perseverance’s pattern tubes would maintain up in a tough Earth touchdown. Standing practically 90 ft (27 meters), it includes a big sling—known as a bow launch system—that may hurl an object into the floor on the identical speeds reached throughout a Mars touchdown.

Ćormarković beforehand labored for the auto trade, testing automobiles that carried crash dummies. In a few of these assessments, the automobiles experience on sleds which might be accelerated to excessive speeds and crashed right into a wall or deformable barrier. There are a selection of the way to speed up the sleds, together with utilizing a sling akin to the bow launch system.

“The assessments we have completed for SHIELD are sort of like a vertical model of the sled assessments,” Ćormarković stated. “However as a substitute of a wall, the sudden cease is because of an influence into the bottom.”

Smashing success

On Aug. 12, the staff gathered on the drop tower with a full-size prototype of SHIELD’s collapsible attenuator—an inverted pyramid of metallic rings that soak up influence. They hung the attenuator on a grapple and inserted a wise cellphone, a radio, and an accelerometer to simulate the electronics a spacecraft would carry.

Sweating in the summertime warmth, they watched SHIELD slowly rise to the highest of the tower.

“Listening to the countdown gave me goose bumps,” stated Nathan Barba, one other SHIELD undertaking member at JPL. “The entire staff was excited to see if the objects contained in the prototype would survive the influence.”

In simply two seconds, the wait was over: The bow launcher slammed SHIELD into the bottom at roughly 110 miles per hour (177 kilometers per hour). That is the pace a Mars lander reaches close to the floor after being slowed by atmospheric drag from its preliminary pace of 14,500 miles per hour (23,335 kilometers per hour) when it enters the Mars environment.

Earlier SHIELD assessments used a dust “touchdown zone,” however for this take a look at, the staff laid a metal plate 2 inches (5 centimeters) thick on the bottom to create a landing tougher than a spacecraft would expertise on Mars. The onboard accelerometer later revealed SHIELD impacted with a drive of about 1 million newtons—corresponding to 112 tons smashing in opposition to it.

Excessive-speed digicam footage of the take a look at reveals that SHIELD impacted at a slight angle, then bounced about 3.5 ft (1 meter) into the air earlier than flipping over. The staff suspects the metal plate triggered the bounce, since no bounce occurred within the earlier assessments.

Upon opening the prototype and retrieving the simulated digital payload, the staff discovered the onboard units—even the sensible cellphone—survived.

“The one {hardware} that was broken had been some plastic elements we weren’t frightened about,” Giersch stated. “General, this take a look at was successful!”

The subsequent step? Designing the remainder of a lander in 2023 and seeing simply how far their idea can go.