NASA studies a lander that resists crashing on Mars

Oct. 21 () –

NASA works on save costs to send missions to Mars with a new form of landing based on a module designed to absorb a strong impact, in the style of car crumple zones.

The US space agency has successfully landed on Mars nine times, relying on state-of-the-art parachutes, massive airbags and jet packs to safely place the spacecraft on the surface. Now engineers are testing whether the easiest way to get to the Martian surface is to crash.

Rather than slow a spacecraft’s high-speed descent, an experimental lander design called SHIELD (Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device) it would use a folding accordion-like base that acts like a car’s crumple zone and absorbs the energy of a hard impact.

The new design could dramatically reduce the cost of landing on Mars by simplifying the complex entry, descent and landing process and expanding the options for possible landing sites.

To test the theory, engineers needed to show that SHIELD can protect sensitive electronics during landing. The team used a drop tower at JPL to test how Perseverance’s sample tubes would withstand a hard landing on Earth. Standing nearly 90 feet tall, it features a giant slingshot, called a bow launch system, that can launch an object to the surface. at the same speeds achieved during a landing on Mars.

In the automotive industry, vehicles carrying crash dummies are tested. In some of those tests, cars ride on sleds that are accelerated to high speeds and crash into a deformable wall or barrier. There are several ways to speed up sleds, including the use of a sling similar to the bow launch system.

“The tests we’ve done for SHIELD are like a vertical version of the sled tests,” he explains. it’s a statement Velibor Cormarkovic, project team member at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) “But instead of a wall, the sudden stop is due to an impact on the ground.”

On August 12, the team met at the launch tower with a full-size prototype of SHIELD’s collapsible attenuator: an inverted pyramid of impact-absorbing metal rings. They hung the dimmer on a claw and inserted a smartphone, radio and accelerometer to simulate the electronics a spacecraft would carry.

Once activated the bow launcher slammed SHIELD into the ground at approximately 110 miles per hour. That’s the speed a Mars lander reaches near the surface after being slowed down by atmospheric drag. from its initial speed of 23,335 kilometers per hour when it enters the Martian atmosphere.

Previous SHIELD tests used a ground “landing zone,” but for this test, the team placed a 2-inch-thick steel plate in the ground to create a harder landing than a spacecraft would experience on Mars. . The onboard accelerometer later revealed that SHIELD impacted with a force of approximately 1 million newtons, comparable to 112 tons crashing into it.

High-speed camera footage from the test shows SHIELD impacted at a slight angle, then bounced about 3.5 feet in the air before flipping over. The team suspects that the steel plate caused the ricochet, since no bounce occurred in previous tests.

Opening the prototype and recovering the simulated electronic payload, the team found that the devices on board, including the smartphone, survived. The next step will be to design the rest of a lander in 2023 and see how far his concept can go.