After blasting off on the latest United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launch from the West Coast on Wednesday (November 10), an inflatable heat shield technology demonstrator called LOFTID appeared to make a flawless trip to space and back. If this is indeed the case, this mission marks a key moment in NASA’s long journey to finally bring humans to Mars. Splashdown of the low Earth orbit flight test of an inflatable decelerator was down, which was exactly as planned. It even blew up in the ocean, some 500 miles (800 km) away from Hawaii – a bonus milestone for the engineering team. “This is one of the most critical technologies we’re establishing right now with this mission, as well as this first successful orbital flight and recovery,” said Jim Reuter, NASA’s associate administrator for the Space Mission Technology Directorate, during the during the NASA TV live stream immediately after the splashdown. After deployment to space, NASA visually confirmed via live video feed the full inflation of LOFTID at about 78 miles (125 km) in altitude, signaling the start of re-entry. Telemetry was briefly lost as the demonstrator returned to Earth, but all was well in the end. The inflatable technology was launched just 5 miles (8 km) from the Kahana II recovery craft, allowing for easy recovery, and LOFTID dropped its flight recorder as planned to collect data. “This is a great, great opportunity to get flight data and see how it really performs,” Greg Swanson, LOFTID instrument lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said during the same live stream. “We know it performed well enough to make it great,” he added of the mission. The $93 million LOFTID, which launched with the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2), is an expandable airfoil designed to slow a spacecraft’s entry into the Martian sky and reduce the amount of heat generated by atmospheric friction. NASA says the technology represents a solution to landing in the ultra-thin atmosphere of Mars, which makes landings especially thin because spacecraft encounter only a fraction of the drag compared to Earth’s atmosphere. Read more: JPSS-2 robust weather satellite launches with heat shield test to Mars on final Atlas V flight from West Coast
LOFTID in the ocean after a successful space flight test on November 10, 2022. (Image credit: NASA Television) Parachutes are not enough to land even smaller payloads on Mars. for example, the golf-cart-sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers dropped to the surface on a set of impact-absorbing airbags. The larger Curiosity and Perseverance rovers required a sky crane with rockets to bring the SUV-sized vehicles to the surface. The sky crane probably maxed out at bringing the one-ton masses of each of the two largest rovers to the surface, however, so NASA is testing this inflatable aircraft to land the people and cargo they need to live on Red Planet. The shape of the flying saucer is designed to compress into a conventional rocket at launch, but expand and inflate when they reach the Red Planet and its atmosphere. (Parachutes will also be used to ensure the safe arrival of the payload to Mars.)
LOFTID parachutes back to Earth after the spaceflight test on November 10, 2022. (Image credit: NASA Television) Certainly, human landing dates on Mars remain far in the future, while NASA remains focused on the Artemis program. Artemis A just overran Tropical Storm Nicole which hit the east coast of Florida overnight. It may launch on its unpaid trip around the moon on November 16, kicking off a series of missions that will include a lunar landing on Artemis 3 later in the 2020s. There is a lot of technology that could be transferred between human lunar missions and Mars excursions, although LOFTID is an exception as the moon has no appreciable atmosphere. Human missions to Mars will probably not happen until at least the 2040s. In the near term, NASA and the European Space Agency plan to launch an uncrewed return sample mission to retrieve the most promising stored rocks from the Perseverance rover project on the Red Planet. Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)? (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
