NASA Launched an Inflatable Flying Saucer, Then Landed It in the Ocean
On Thursday morning, NASA sent a giant inflatable device to space and then brought it back down from orbit, splashing in the ocean near Hawaii. From a report: You might think of it as a bouncy castle from space, although the people in charge of the mission would prefer you did not. "I would say that would be inaccurate," Neil Cheatwood, principal investigator for the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator, or LOFTID for short, said of the comparison during an interview. LOFTID may sound like just an amusing trick, but the $93 million project demonstrates an intriguing technology that could help NASA in its goal of getting people safely to the surface of Mars someday. The agency has landed a series of robotic spacecraft on Mars, but the current approaches only work for payloads weighing up to about 1.5 tons -- about the bulk of a small car. That is inadequate for the larger landers, carrying 20 tons or more, that are needed for people and the supplies they will need to survive on the red planet. A more accurate description of the device might be that it is a saucer, 20 feet wide when inflated. It is made of layers of fabric that can survive falling into the atmosphere at 18,000 miles per hour and temperatures close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, an inflatable heat shield shares a key characteristic with a bouncy castle: Uninflated, it can be folded and packed tightly. LOFTID fit in a cylinder a bit over four feet wide and one and a half feet high. For a traditional rigid heat shield, there is no way to cram something 20 feet in diameter into a rocket that is not that wide. A larger surface like LOFTID's generates much more air friction -- essentially it is a better brake as it slices through the upper atmosphere, and the greater drag allows heavier payloads to be slowed down. For future Mars missions, the inflatable heat shield would be combined with other systems like parachutes and retrorockets to guide the lander en route to a soft landing.
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