The parachute for NASA's next mission to Mars passed flight-qualification
testing in March and April 2009 inside the world's largest wind tunnel, at
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, to be launched in 2011 and land on
Mars in 2012, will use the largest parachute ever built to fly on an
extraterrestrial mission.
This image shows a duplicate qualification-test parachute inflated in an
80-mile-per-hour (36-meter-per-second) wind inside the test facility. The
parachute uses a configuration called disk-gap-band. It has 80 suspension
lines, measures more than 50 meters (165 feet) in length, and opens to a
diameter of nearly 16 meters (51 feet). Most of the orange and white
fabric is nylon, though a small disk of heavier polyester is used near the
vent in the apex of the canopy due to higher stresses there. It is
designed to survive deployment at Mach 2.2 in the Martian atmosphere,
where it will generate up to 65,000 pounds of drag force.
The wind tunnel is 24 meters (80 feet) tall and 37 meters (120 feet) wide,
big enough to house a Boeing 737. It is part of the National Full-Scale
Aerodynamics Complex, operated by the Arnold Engineering Development
Center of the U.S. Air Force.
Pioneer Aerospace, South Windsor, Conn., built the parachutes for testing
and for flying on the Mars Science Laboratory. NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Science Laboratory project
for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington, and is building and
testing the mission's spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California
Institute of Technology.