Kauai facility to assist Mars flight research

NASA recently showed off a saucer-shaped Mars entry vehicle in California that is bound for Hawaii for a unique series of test flights starting in June.

They should be fairly impressive.

As part of its Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator project, NASA will send the 15-foot-diameter saucer aloft by balloon from Kauai, boost it from 120,000 feet to as high as 180,000 feet by rocket, and then, as it hurtles through the thin air at 2,600 mph, deploy a speed-reducing inflatable doughnut around the aircraft, followed by a big parachute, until it plops into the ocean for pickup.

It will be refitted and refired three more times through the summer of 2015.

The missions launched from the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility will test technology to enable larger payloads to be safely landed on the surface of Mars, and also allow access to much more of the red planet’s surface by enabling landings at higher altitude sites, according to the space agency.

NASA previously said the Kauai flights will represent the first supersonic parachute tests for re-entry missions in more than 40 years.

Current technology for decelerating from high-speed atmospheric entry to landing on Mars dates back to the Viking program, which put two landers on the planet in 1976, NASA said.

As NASA plans new robotic missions to Mars and looks ahead to human science expeditions, the spacecraft needed to make landings will become increasingly larger.

"Part of that technology set is a new type of parachute, a new configuration of parachute, a much, much larger parachute than we’ve ever flown before, deployed at Mach numbers, at speeds much higher than we’ve ever deployed before," Ian Clark, NASA’s principal investigator for the project, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in June.

That means a "ringsail" parachute 99 feet in diameter — more than twice the area of the most recent Viking-based parachute used to land the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012.

Also to be tested are two doughnutlike pressure vessels, called Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerators, designed to create drag and slow the re-entry vehicle.