WASHINGTON: NASA has a cool new toy. It looks like a flying saucer and will be used to land heavy cargo on Mars.
NASA works on new technology to land cargo on Mars. NASA calls this new spaceship Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD).
Yesterday scientists and engineers at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena performed the final tests of the LDSD test vehicle before going to Hawaii for its near-space test. The rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle will go into near-space from the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii, in June.
In the lab NASA performed a “spin table test” in which the 15-foot-wide, 7,000-pound test vehicle was spun up to 30 rpm to check its balance.
In mid-April, the vehicle will be flown to Kauai. During the June experimental flight test, a balloon will carry the test vehicle from the naval facility to an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36 kilometers). There, over the Pacific, it will be dropped and its booster rocket will kick in and carry it to 180,000 feet (55 kilometers), accelerating to Mach 4. Once in the very rarified air high above the Pacific, the saucer will begin a series of automated tests of two breakthrough technologies. The supersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (SIAD-R), which is an inflatable doughnut that increases the vehicle’s size and, as a result, its drag, will be deployed at about Mach 3.8. It will quickly slow the vehicle to Mach 2.5 where the parachute, the largest supersonic parachute ever flown, will deploy. About 45 minutes later, the saucer is expected to make a controlled landing onto the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
WASHINGTON: Electric carmaker Tesla announced Sunday it was upgrading its Autopilot software to use more advanced radar technology. In a...
