LOFTID forms a shield for safe descent to Mars

The Martian atmosphere is around 100 times thinner than Earth’s and therefore not able to produce enough drag to decelerate a manned spacecraft laden with cargo.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover is the largest platform to have touched down on the Red Planet, but at 2,000lb (907kg) it was close to the weight limit for existing deceleration technology. Delivering humans and their cargo to Mars will require much bigger payloads than Curiosity’s, which landed on Mars in 2012.

“To take humans to Mars, we have to deliver a small house,” said Neil Cheatwood, senior engineer for planetary entry, descent and landing at NASA’s Langley Research Center.  “You need an aeroshell much larger than you can fit inside a rocket.”

To deliver that payload, engineers are working on a decelerator that can withstand the heat and speed of approaching the Red Planet. To this end, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and United Launch Alliance are working on LOFTID (Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator), which is part of the HIAD (Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator) programme.