Inflatable heat shield a ‘major success’ that could land humans on Mars, NASA says

The Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator Technology Demonstration, or LOFTID, went into space on Nov 10 along with the Joint Polar Satellite System-2, a polar weather satellite, as a secondary payload.

After LOFTID separated from the polar satellite and inflated, the aeroshell reentered the atmosphere from low Earth orbit.

Upon re-entry, LOFTID faced temperatures reaching 1,649 degrees Celsius (3,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and reached speeds of nearly 28,968 kilometers per hour (18,000 miles per hour) – the ultimate test for the materials used to construct the inflatable structure. which includes a woven ceramic fabric called silicon carbide.

Preliminary data helped the team determine if the aeroshell could effectively slow and survive the steep dive from low Earth orbit into the ocean. The result: “A pretty resounding yes,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

A full investigation into LOFTID’s performance is expected to take approximately a year.

The mission aims to test inflatable heat shield technology, which could also land larger robotic missions on Venus or Saturn’s moon Titan, or return hefty payloads to Earth. Currently used aeroshells or heat shields depend on the size of a rocket’s envelope. But an inflatable aeroshell could bypass that dependency — and send heavier missions to different planets.

The LOFTID demonstration was about 6 meters in diameter.

When a spacecraft enters a planet’s atmosphere, it is hit by aerodynamic forces that slow it down. On Mars, where the atmosphere is less than 1% the density of Earth’s atmosphere, extra help is needed to create the drag needed to slow a spacecraft and land safely.

For this reason, NASA engineers believe a large deployable aeroshell like LOFTID, which inflates and is protected by a flexible heat shield, could hit the brakes on its journey through the Martian atmosphere. The aeroshell is designed to create more drag in the upper atmosphere to cause the spacecraft to slow down sooner, which also prevents some of the super-intense heating.

Currently, NASA can land 1 ton (2,205 pounds) on the surface of Mars like the car-sized Perseverance rover. But something like LOFTID could land on Mars between 20 and 40 tons (44,092 to 88,184 pounds), said Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

When the salvage team retrieved the aeroshell from the ocean, they were surprised to find that the outside “looked absolutely pristine,” said John DiNonno, LOFTID chief engineer at NASA Langley. “You wouldn’t have known that there was a very intense reentry,” he said.

In fact, the inflatable structure is in such good condition that it looks like it could be reused and flown again, DiNonno said, but it must undergo rigorous testing before such a decision can be made.

There is still an enormous amount of data to process, including specific temperatures that LOFTID was exposed to at various points in its flight.

Once the full study is complete, scientists could use the results to work on the next, larger generation of LOFTID. The experiment was designed to fit the polar satellite as a ride-along demo. Next, LOFTID needs to be scaled to test how it would perform on a mission to Mars, which would potentially require a three to fourfold increase in its overall size.

“To send people to the moon or to Mars, we need material – lots of it, which means we have to put a lot of mass into space,” Del Corso said.

“We are now capable of both launching and launching heavy payloads into space. Both of these achievements are big steps towards enabling human access and exploration. We’re going to space and we want to be able to stay there.”

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