The agency’s Artemis 1 mission launched on Wednesday morning (Nov. 16), sending an uncrewed Orion capsule toward the moon atop a massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
NASA is counting on SLS and Orion to help the agency establish a lunar base by the late 2020s — a key priority of the Artemis program. And, if all goes according to plan, the two vehicles will also enable even more ambitious feats, helping astronauts reach Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
Last week, on Nov. 10, NASA tested hardware that could help these manned Mars missions land safely — an inflatable heat shield called LOFTID, which was launched into Earth orbit aboard the JPSS- 2 and then returned to Earth. LOFTID survived the fiery return trip in excellent condition, suggesting the technology has great potential to help land heavy equipment on Mars, team members said.
“The demonstration was a huge success,” said Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, during a press conference Thursday (Nov. 17).
“We now have the ability to put heavy payloads into space and bring them back,” he added. “These two successes are huge steps in facilitating human access and exploration. We’re going into space and we want to be able to stay there.”
LOFTID (short for “Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator”) is an inflatable heat shield designed to slow the descent of a payload through a planetary atmosphere by gravity.
NASA sees this as a promising strategy for its manned Mars plans, which will require landing large payloads such as habitat modules on the Red Planet. Such equipment could tip the scales at about 20 tons — too heavy for today’s Mars entry, descent and landing systems.
NASA’s 1-ton Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, for example, more or less used the rocket-powered crane method that landed them safely in the Red Planet’s air, agency officials said. (Parachutes were also part of these rovers’ flights, as would an inflatable heat shield landing system.)
Last week’s launch provided an ambitious test of this technology. LOFTID was launched in compact configuration with JPSS-2 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. After deployment from the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage, LOFTID expanded to its full diameter of approximately 20 feet (6 meters), positioned for return on Earth and took the plunge.
Initial inspections, conducted after the heat shield was removed from the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii, showed that LOFTID passed the test with flying colors. And another week of analysis reinforced this conclusion.
“The vehicle just looks beautiful. It looks pristine, and I really can’t say enough about that,” Del Corso said. “It was surprising to me how well, how good the vehicle looked.”
Scientists and engineers will continue to analyze data for another year or so to fully understand the test flight, members of the LOFTID team said.
However, the LOFTID project, which cost a total of $93 million over five years, is not the last step in Mars’ inflatable heat shields.
A structure about three or four times wider than LOFTID would likely require a large payload such as a habitat module safely down on the Red Planet, project team members said. Scaling the technology so dramatically poses a number of challenges, which scientists and engineers can now begin to seriously assess after LOFTID’s successful flight.
“There’s a lot of work to be done with it [scaling up]; there are facility issues with that that need to be addressed,” Trudy Cortes, director of technology demonstrations at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said during Thursday’s briefing.
“But the roadmap will guide us in that and our future investments in that,” he added. “We’re taking a look at that now, and really the near-term future for that. So yes, that would be the next step for that capability.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018, illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
