SHIELD: Why NASA Is Trying to Crash Land on Mars - SciTechDaily

The experimental SHIELD lander is designed to sorb a hard interaction similar a car’s crumple zone.

NASA has successfully landed spacecraft connected Mars 9 times, utilizing cutting-edge parachutes, monolithic airbags, and jetpacks to safely interaction down connected the surface. Now engineers are investigating whether oregon not crashing is the easiest mode to get to the Martian surface.

Rather than dilatory a spacecraft’s high-speed descent earlier touching down, an experimental lander plan called SHIELD (Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device) would usage an accordion-like, collapsible basal that acts similar the crumple portion of a car and absorbs the vigor of a hard impact.

By simplifying the harrowing entry, descent, and landing process, the caller plan could drastically trim the outgo of landing connected Mars. It could besides grow options for imaginable landing sites.

SHIELD is simply a Mars lander conception that could let lower-cost missions to sojourn the Martian aboveground by utilizing an impact-absorbing, collapsible basal to safely clang land. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“We deliberation we could spell to much treacherous areas, wherever we wouldn’t privation to hazard trying to spot a billion-dollar rover with our existent landing systems,” said SHIELD’s task manager, Lou Giersch of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory successful Southern California. “Maybe we could adjacent onshore respective of these astatine antithetic difficult-to-access locations to physique a network.”

Car Crashes, Mars Landings

Much of SHIELD’s plan is heavy influenced by enactment done for NASA’s Mars Sample Return campaign. The archetypal measurement successful that run involves the Perseverance rover collecting stone samples successful airtight metallic tubes. In the future, a spacecraft volition transportation those Martian samples backmost to Earth successful a tiny capsule and safely clang onshore successful a deserted location.

Studying approaches for that process led engineers to wonderment if the wide thought was reversible, said Velibor Cormarkovic, SHIELD squad subordinate astatine JPL.

“If you privation to onshore thing hard connected Earth, wherefore can’t you bash it the different mode astir for Mars?” helium said. “And if we tin bash a hard landing connected Mars, we cognize SHIELD could enactment connected planets oregon moons with denser atmospheres.”

To trial whether the mentation could really enactment successful practice, engineers needed to beryllium SHIELD tin support delicate electronics during landing. The squad utilized a driblet operation lasting astir 90 feet (27 meters) astatine JPL to trial however Perseverance’s illustration tubes would clasp up successful a hard Earth landing. It features a elephantine sling – called a bow motorboat strategy – that tin hurl an entity into the aboveground astatine the aforesaid speeds reached during a Mars landing.

Cormarkovic antecedently worked for the car industry, investigating cars that carried clang dummies. In immoderate of those tests, the cars thrust connected sleds that are accelerated to precocious speeds and crashed into a partition oregon deformable barrier. There are a fig of ways to accelerate the sleds, including utilizing a sling akin to the bow motorboat system.

“The tests we’ve done for SHIELD are benignant of similar a vertical mentation of the sled tests,” Cormarkovic said. “But alternatively of a wall, the abrupt halt is owed to an interaction into the ground.”

Smashing Success

On August 12, the squad gathered astatine the driblet operation with a full-size prototype of SHIELD’s collapsible attenuator – an inverted pyramid of metallic rings that sorb impact. They hung the attenuator connected a grapple and inserted a smartphone, a radio, and an accelerometer to simulate the electronics a spacecraft would carry.

Sweating successful the summertime heat, they watched SHIELD dilatory emergence to the apical of the tower.

“Hearing the countdown gave maine goosebumps,” said Nathan Barba, different SHIELD task subordinate astatine JPL. “The full squad was excited to spot if the objects wrong the prototype would past the impact.”

In conscionable 2 seconds, the hold was over: The bow launcher slammed SHIELD into the crushed astatine astir 110 miles per hr (177 kilometers per hour). That’s the velocity a Mars lander reaches adjacent the aboveground aft being slowed by atmospheric resistance from its archetypal velocity of 14,500 miles per hr (23,335 kilometers per hour) erstwhile it enters the Mars atmosphere.

Previous SHIELD tests utilized a ungraded “landing zone,” but for this test, the squad laid a alloy sheet 2 inches (5 centimeters) heavy connected the crushed to make a landing harder than a spacecraft would acquisition connected Mars. The onboard accelerometer aboriginal revealed SHIELD impacted with a unit of astir 1 cardinal newtons – comparable to 112 tons smashing against it.

High-speed camera footage of the trial shows that SHIELD impacted astatine a flimsy angle, past bounced astir 3.5 feet (1 meter) into the aerial earlier flipping over. The squad suspects the alloy sheet caused the bounce, since nary bounce occurred successful the earlier tests.

Upon opening the prototype and retrieving the simulated physics payload, the squad recovered the onboard devices – adjacent the smartphone – survived.

“The lone hardware that was damaged were immoderate integrative components we weren’t disquieted about,” Giersch said. “Overall, this trial was a success!”

The adjacent step? Designing the remainder of a lander successful 2023 and seeing conscionable however acold their conception tin go.