A NASA flying saucer will be sent aloft by balloon from Kauai in June in a second test of braking technology intended for use in landings on Mars.

At an altitude of 120,000 feet, the balloon will drop the saucer, which will then fire a rocket to reach 180,000 feet and four times the speed of sound.

At Mach 3.8 the craft will deploy an inflatable "doughnut" air brake, which will slow it down to Mach 2.5.

Then it will pop a parachute that — if all goes well — will allow it to safely splash down in the Pacific about 45 minutes later.

NASA is hoping the test will be smoother than the first one, in June, when the 110-foot parachute shredded during its deployment at nearly 2,000 mph.

The space agency actually was pleased with the launch from the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility as it continues to test new landing technologies in Hawaii for ever larger payloads — and eventually humans — to be sent to Mars.

"That (2014) test was such a blessing to this program," Ian Clark, principal investigator for the parachute project, formally known as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, said in October. "We got an early look at the parachute we were going to test in 2015 and found we needed to go back and rethink everything we thought we knew about supersonic parachute inflation."

The near-space environment high over the Pacific approximates the thin atmosphere of Mars.

Up till now the technology for decelerating from the high speed of atmospheric entry to the final stages of landing on Mars dated from NASA’s Viking Program, which put two landers on Mars in 1976, the space agency said.

The basic Viking parachute design has been used ever since, including in 2012 to deliver the Curiosity rover to Mars. It’s also expected to be used on the Mars 2020 mission.

NASA wants to use atmospheric drag to slow even heavier entry vehicles on future missions and save rocket engines and fuel for final maneuvers and landing procedures.

The new drag devices can increase payload delivery to the surface of Mars from the current 1.5 metric tons to 3 to 5 metric tons for robotic missions. Putting humans on Mars would require the ability to land 10 to 20 metric tons, NASA said.

The new 110-foot parachute, with about twice the area of the most recent Viking-based parachute used to land Curiosity, was developed to help slow the entry vehicle from Mach 2 to subsonic speeds.

Rob Manning, the LDSD chief engineer, has said parachutes open much faster in the thin air at 180,000 feet.

The design used last summer, known as a "disk sail," with a single piece of fabric on top, failed, he said.

The agency decided, "Let’s make this the strongest parachute we can imagine using something called ring sail," Manning said.

The ring sail design replaces the single canopy piece on top with concentric rings and 2,000 panels sewn together on pieces of Kevlar, he said.

"So we believe this parachute is a lot stronger than the parachute we tested last summer," Manning said. "The question is: Will it be strong enough?"

A test of the new design at Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake in Cali­for­nia using a rocket sled to pull the parachute found its breaking point to be much greater than needed.

"We found it was way higher, much higher than we would be seeing, knock on wood, with this test in Hawaii when we do it in June," Manning said.

The test conducted June 28 began when a 34 million-cubic-foot helium balloon was used to launch the 7,000-pound LDSD vehicle from the Pacific Missile Range Facility.

At an altitude of 120,000 feet, the test vehicle was released from the balloon, and a solid rocket accelerated it to faster than Mach 4 and an altitude of 35 miles, above the stratosphere.

A Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, a doughnut-shaped air brake, was inflated around the exterior of the saucer, increasing resistance and slowing the vehicle to 2.5 times the speed of sound.

The disk-sail parachute was then unfurled to slow the vehicle further — and promptly showed some serious tearing. The test vehicle was recovered intact after the splashdown.

Later this month the new test vehicle will be flown to Kauai for the second of three planned launches.