Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Mars entry test a success despite chute snag

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: June 30, 2014 9:38:31 AM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Mars entry test a success despite chute snag

NASA launches 'flying saucer" for tests of Mars entry technology
06/28/2014 05:54 PM

Editor's note...
Posted 12:15 PM ET, 06/28/14: NASA preps 'flying saucer' for high-altitude test flight
Updated at 02:45 PM ET, 06/28/14: Balloon launched; test flight under way (10grafld-pickup11thgraf: Flying at more X X X)
Updated at 05:35 PM ET, 06/28/14: Test vehicle released from balloon for powered flight; inflatable aero brake works, but supersonic parachute fails to inflate (complete writethru)
By WILLIAM HARWOOD
CBS News

A giant helium balloon lifted a 3.5-ton flying saucer-shaped research vehicle to an altitude of more than 23 miles Saturday and released it for a dramatic rocket-powered boost through the extreme upper atmosphere to test an inflatable doughnut-like braking system and a huge supersonic parachute needed for future missions to Mars.

The inflatable aero-brake appeared to work normally in live video downlinked from the test vehicle, but the parachute, the largest ever built for deployment at more than twice the speed of sound, failed to fully inflate in a disappointment for flight controllers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"PI (principle investigator) has called 'no chute.' We don't have full chute inflation," a flight controller reported.
Three views of the experimental Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator showing the test vehicle with its braking parachute deployed along with before-and-after views of the craft's inflatable braking system. (Credit: NASA)

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator then fell toward impact in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii. The carrier balloon apparently came apart after the LDSD's release and it was not immediately clear what recovery crews standing by in the landing zone might be able to retrieve.

In any case, the test flight appeared to meet all of its major objectives but one and engineers are hopeful recorded telemetry will shed light on what went wrong with the parachute deploy.

"Our objectives for this first flight are to launch it from here, get the balloon off and out over the water, to get it up to altitude where we can drop the vehicle and conduct this powered flight and get the data back from it to see how it works," Mark Adler, LDSD project manager at JPL, said before launch.

He stressed the test flight was just that, a test flight, and any number of things could go wrong. But "if we fire that motor and we get data back from it, that is a great day. That way we can learn exactly what happened and understand what to do for our next flights."

The idea was to put the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator in the thin extreme upper atmosphere, at a velocity of more than four times the speed of sound, to mimic the conditions a Mars-bound spacecraft might experience slamming into the atmosphere of Mars.

The goal is to develop new atmospheric braking systems that will allow NASA to launch larger, more sophisticated landers to the red planet.

The heaviest spacecraft ever sent to the surface of Mars -- NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity rover -- tipped the scales at about one ton. To get heavier robots to the surface, and eventual crewed spacecraft that could weigh 20 tons or more, NASA must develop better systems to quickly slow large vehicles in the thin martian atmosphere.
Fiery exhaust can be seen shooting from the nozzle of a Star 48 solid-fuel motor used to accelerate a NASA test vehicle to more than four times the speed of sound to test new atmospheric braking technologies for future Mars missions. An inflatable aerobrake appeared to work normally, but a new supersonic parachute failed to fully inflate. (Credit: NASA TV)

Enter the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD, the first of three test vehicles to fly in a $200 million research program aimed at developing new technologies for future Mars missions.

"Landing on Mars is an extremely challenging thing to do," Ian Clark, principal investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said during a preflight briefing. "The atmosphere is extremely thin, it's about 1 percent the density of Earth's atmosphere. That means you need very large devices to react against the atmosphere to create the drag that we use to slow the vehicles down as they enter the atmosphere.

"If you want to land things that are even heavier than the Mars Science Laboratory, if you want to land several tons -- and as you cast your eyes to the horizon and you think about landing humans on the surface of Mars, missions that will be 10 to 15 tons, 20 tons or more -- you're going to need extremely large drag devices to slow those vehicles down. We don't have those currently, and that's what LDSD is developing."

The test vehicle's high-altitude balloon, filled with 34 million cubic feet of helium, lifted off from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii, at 2:40 p.m. EDT (GMT-4). Initial attempts to launch the craft earlier this month were blocked by the weather, but conditions were acceptable Saturday and the balloon was cleared for flight.

A live television feed showed the giant balloon climbing away, pulling the LDSD from its support cradle and up into the sky for a two-hour 25-minute climb to an altitude of around 120,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean west of the test range.

After a series of final readiness checks, commands were sent to release the LDSD from the balloon. As it briefly fell back toward Earth, small rocket motors fired to spin the vehicle up for stability before an ATK Star 48 solid-fuel rocket motor ignited to accelerate the test article and boost it an additional 11 miles to some 180,000 feet, or 34 miles.

The test vehicle featured two new technologies. The first was an inflatable torus around a traditional heat shield known as the Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, or SIAD, that gives the test vehicle the general shape of a flying saucer. The second new technology was a huge parachute, the largest ever designed to deploy at more than twice the speed of sound.
In this artist's concept, NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator test vehicle is accelerated to the edge of space to test an inflatable braking system and a huge new supersonic parachute that engineers hope will pave the way to landing larger payloads on the surface of Mars. (Credit: NASA)

Flying at more than four times the speed of sound, the flight plan called for the heavily instrumented SIAD torus to inflate, expanding the diameter of the entry vehicle from about 15.4 feet to 19.7 feet. After slowing to about 2.5 times the speed of sound, the parachute was expected to deploy.

All of that appeared to go like clockwork.

"All spin motors fired," someone said as the LDSD fell from the carrier balloon. Seconds later, the Star 48 rocket motor ignited.

"Mach 1," a flight controller called, monitoring telemetry as the vehicle accelerated through the speed of sound. Seconds later, "Mach 2."

"Acceleration is good, vehicle is stable," a controller said.

As the spacecraft passed through Mach 3, telemetry showed "acceleration is good, vehicle is stable." Live video showed a torrent of fiery exhaust blasting from the nozzle of the Star 48 as the limb of the Earth wheeled about in the background.

A few seconds later, the test vehicle was moving at more than four times the speed of sound. The rocket motor then burned out and small motors fired to stop the vehicle's stabilizing spin.

Go-Pro video cameras capatured the inflation of the SIAD, followed by the parachute's release. Live video showed the huge chute streaming behind the test vehicle, but it never inflated to its full 110-foot diameter.

"Come on..." someone said anxiously.

But it was not to be. A few moments later, the a flight controller called "PI (principle investigator) has called 'no chute.' We don't have full chute inflation."

"I'm going to declare that a bad chute, is that your understanding?" the flight director asked.

"That's affirm."

"Please inform the recovery director we have bad chute."

The SIAD torus initially was tested at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, Calif., using a rocket sled to accelerate the device to several hundred miles per hour. To test the parachute, a long cable was connected, fed through a pulley system and attached to a rocket sled. The parachute then was released from a helicopter, the rocket sled was fired up and the parachute was pulled toward the ground with a force equivalent to about 100,000 pounds of drag.
The flight plan for Saturday's test flight of NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. The mission appeared to go smoothly until the deployment of a new supersonic parachute, which failed to fully inflate. (Credit: NASA)

But to fully test the system engineers wanted to duplicate conditions a spacecraft would experience at Mars.

"What we're trying to do is replicate the environment in which these technologies would be used," Clark said before flight. "That means replicating the atmosphere, in particular the density of the atmosphere, which at Mars is extremely thin. To find (those conditions) we have to go halfway to the edge of space, or about 180,000 feet here on Earth, to test these devices. And we have to go several times the speed of sound."

Two more LDSD vehicles are being built for "flights of record" next summer.

"We've been there before, eight successful landings on the surface of Mars, the United States leads in this area," said Mike Gazarik, director of space technology development at NASA Headquarters. "It's one of the more difficult challenges.

"When we look at the Curiosity rover, which landed two years ago, it's about a metric ton on the surface of Mars. We know that for exploration, for future robotic exploration, for future human exploration, we need more than that. ... And so for us, it's the challenges of Mars -- how do we get there, how do we land there, how do we live there, how do we leave there?"

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator "focuses on that very difficult challenge of landing there."

"We need to test and we need to learn," Gazarik said. "And we need to do it quickly and efficiently. ... It's about more mass, going to more elevations on the surface of Mars and landing more accurately."

© 2014 William Harwood/CBS News

NASA's Orion Deep Space Capsule Completes Most Complex Parachute Test Ahead of Maiden Launch
by Ken Kremer on June 28, 2014
A test version of NASA's Orion manned spacecraft descends under its three main parachutes above the U.S. Army Proving Ground in Arizona in the agency's most difficult test of the parachutes system's performance to prepare Orion for its first trip to space in December 2014. Credit: NASA/Rad Sinyak
A test version of NASA's Orion deep space capsule has completed its most complex and last full flight-like parachute drop test on June 25 ahead of the maiden launch on the EFT-1 mission now slated for early December 2014.
The descent test was conducted at an altitude of 35,000 feet over the Arizona desert at the U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Ground by pulling the test vehicle out of a huge C-17 cargo aircraft.
The test also included the addition of several added stress tests to check out the ability of the parachute system to compensate and examine capsule and astronaut crew survival via several potential failure modes.
For example, engineers rigged one of the main parachutes to skip the intermediate phase of the three-phase process to unfurl each of Orion's three parachutes, called reefing.
"This tested whether one of the main parachutes could go directly from opening a little to being fully open without an intermediary step, proving the system can tolerate potential failures," according to NASA.
The goal is to prove that that parachute system will slow Orion to ensure a safe landing speed for the astronaut crews returning from deep space missions to the Moon, Asteroids and eventually Mars.
The Orion crew module for Exploration Flight Test-1 is shown in the Final Assembly and System Testing (FAST) Cell, positioned over the service module just prior to mating the two sections together. Credit: NASA/Rad Sinyak
"We've put the parachutes through their paces in ground and airdrop testing in just about every conceivable way before we begin sending them into space on Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 before the year's done," said Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer in a state
"The series of tests has proven the system and will help ensure crew and mission safety for our astronauts in the future."
Orion is slated to launch on its inaugural unmanned EFT-1 test flight in December 2014 atop the mammoth, triple barreled United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Orion crew capsule, Service Module and 6 ton Launch Abort System (LAS) mock up stack inside the transfer aisle of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Service module at bottom. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
This test also marked the last time that the entire parachute sequence involving the deployment of all three 116 foot-wide main chutes will be tested before the December launch.
For some of the parachutes, this was the highest altitude drop test attempted.
"Engineers also put additional stresses on the parachutes by allowing the test version of Orion to free fall for 10 seconds, which increased the vehicle's speed and aerodynamic pressure," NASA noted in a statement.
The parachute deployment and unfurling can only begin after jettisoning of the spacecraft's forward bay cover. The chutes are housed below the cover which protects the chutes until reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
The two-orbit, four- hour EFT-1 flight will lift the Orion spacecraft and its attached second stage to an orbital altitude of 3,600 miles, about 15 times higher than the International Space Station (ISS) – and farther than any human spacecraft has journeyed in 40 years.
One of the primary goals of NASA's eagerly anticipated Orion EFT-1 uncrewed test flight is to test the efficacy of the heat shield in protecting the vehicle – and future human astronauts – from excruciating temperatures reaching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit (2200 C) during scorching re-entry heating.
At the conclusion of the EFT-1 flight, the detached Orion capsule plunges back and re-enters the Earth's atmosphere at 20,000 MPH (32,000 kilometers per hour).
"That's about 80% of the reentry speed experienced by the Apollo capsule after returning from the Apollo moon landing missions," Scott Wilson, NASA's Orion Manager of Production Operations at KSC, told me during an interview at KSC.
The parachute system comprising of two drogue parachutes and a trio of main parachutes – nearly the size of a football field – will then unfurl to slow Orion down to just 20 mph for a safe splashdown and recovery by the US Navy in the Pacific Ocean.
The Orion EFT-1 mission will end with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. During the stationary recovery test of Orion at Norfolk Naval Base on Aug. 15, 2013, US Navy divers attached tow lines and led the test capsule to a flooded well deck on the USS Arlington. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com.
Another drop test scheduled for August will test the combined failure of one drogue parachute and one main parachute, as well as new parachute design features, says NASA.
Meanwhile, Orion's prime contractor Lockheed Martin is finishing assembly and test operations of the EFT-1 capsule inside the Operations and Checkout Facility (O & C) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) flying in December's launch
Stay tuned here for Ken's continuing Orion, Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, commercial space, Curiosity, Mars rover, MAVEN, MOM and more planetary and human spaceflight news.
Ken Kremer

NASA calls test for future Mars landings a qualified success
NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator test vehicle arrives at the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai. It was tested on June 28 in the atmosphere above Hawaii. (NASA)

James Queally contact the reporter

NASA announces a mostly successful test off Hawaii to simulate landing heavy spacecraft on Mars
NASA test vehicle's parachute fails to deploy properly, causing a hard landing in the Pacific
NASA will hold a media teleconference on Sunday to discuss the results of its LDSD test off Hawaii
A NASA vehicle launched high into the atmosphere to explore how to land heavy spacecraft, and possibly human beings, on Mars splashed down off Hawaii on Saturday, completing a mostly successful test, the agency announced.
The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD, launched about 11:40 a.m. PDT from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
The test was the result of a four-year project aimed at landing a vehicle on Mars heavier than the roughly 2,000-pound Curiosity rover, which arrived on the Red Planet in 2012.
Though NASA deemed the test a success, even sending out a celebratory Twitter message -- "It's a wrap!" -- about 3 p.m., NBC News was reporting that the vehicle's supersonic parachute failed to deploy properly, causing a hard landing in the Pacific Ocean.
The LDSD is meant to slow a Mars-bound body, likely to be traveling at four times the speed of sound, with the expansion of an inflatable doughnut followed by the release of a large parachute.
With the successful test run, the LDSD should allow NASA to ferry loads weighing up to 3 metric tons to Mars' surface, twice the capacity of the Curiosity mission.
In its statement, NASA said the test vehicle dropped from its balloon successfully and its rockets appeared to fire as expected.
Scientists had long struggled to find a test environment similar to Mars' thin atmosphere, but found something close in the air over Kauai.
To conduct the test, NASA hitched the vehicle to a balloon and floated it to the upper reaches of the stratosphere -- about 120,000 feet, or 22 miles, in the air.
NASA will hold a media teleconference on Sunday to discuss the results of the test.
Times staff writer Julie Rosen contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

NASA Launches 'Flying Saucer' to Test Mars Landing Tech
By Mike Wall, Senior Writer | June 28, 2014 05:45pm ET

This artist's concept shows the test vehicle for NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD), designed to test landing technologies for future Mars missions. A balloon will lift the vehicle to high altitudes, where a rocket will take it even higher, to the top of the stratosphere, at several times the speed of sound.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech View full size image
New NASA gear that could help humanity set up an outpost on Mars has gotten its first test flight.
The space agency launched its Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) test vehicle today (June 28) from Hawaii. Although the first part of the test went well, the vehicle's huge parachute failed to deploy properly — but LDSD engineers likely won't view that as a disaster.
"We're doing something that hasn't been done before," LDSD principal investigator Ian Clark, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told Space.com in April. "While I'm optimistic that things will go well, if they don't, that's probably even better, because we tend to learn more from the failures than from the successes." [NASA's Inflatable Flying Saucer for Mars Landings (Photos)]
Today's test — which lifted off from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on the island of Kauai at about 2:40 p.m. EDT (1840 GMT; 8:40 a.m. local Hawaii time) — was designed to help NASA engineers get their first good look at how equipment designed to slow the descent of heavy spacecraft through the Red Planet's atmosphere performs at high speeds in Mars-like conditions.
Today's flight was originally scheduled for June 3, but poor weather conditions pushed it back multiple times, causing a delay of nearly a month.
New tech's first flight
The LDSD project is developing and testing a 100-foot-wide (30.5 meters) parachute — the biggest supersonic chute ever flown — and two saucer-like devices called Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerators, or SIADs.
One SIAD is 20 feet (6 m) wide, while the other measures 26 feet (8 m) across. Both devices are built to fit around the rim of atmospheric entry vehicles like the one that carried NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in August 2012, slowing them down by increasing their drag.
Today's test called for a huge balloon to carry the 7,000-lb. (3,175 kilograms) test vehicle, which was equipped with the big chute and the 20-foot SIAD, up to an altitude of 23 miles (37 kilometers). The balloon would drop the craft, whose onboard rocket motor would kick on and boost it to Mach 4 (four times the speed of sound) and 34 miles up (55 km).
The thin air at such heights is a good analog for the Martian atmosphere, which is just 1 percent as dense as that of Earth at sea level, researchers said.
If the test had gone perfectly, the SIAD would have inflated and slowed the test vehicle down to Mach 2.5, at which point the chute would have deployed and taken the craft down to a soft splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
But things did not go perfectly. The balloon dropped the test vehicle at 5:05 p.m. EDT (2105 GMT), and the rocket appeared to fire properly. The SIAD seemed to inflate as planned, but the parachute didn't deploy correctly, officials said. More information will become available later, after engineers have had a chance to analyze data from the test.
The LDSD team aims to retrieve the downed balloon — which, when inflated, could fill a football stadium such as the Rose Bowl — and the test vehicle by boat, both to recover all the test data and to avoid littering the ocean, NASA officials said. It could take about a day to track this gear down.
Getting big payloads down on Mars
At 1 ton, the SUV-size Curiosity rover is the biggest spacecraft ever to touch down on Mars. The robot landed softly thanks to a bold and complicated scheme that involved a 51-foot-wide (15.5 m) parachute and a rocket-powered sky crane, which lowered Curiosity down to the surface on cables.
NASA workers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wearing clean room "bunny suits," prepare the LDSD test article for shipment later this month to Hawaii. LDSD will help land bigger space payloads on Mars or return them back to Earth.
Credit: NASA/JPL
View full size image
The sky crane can (and probably will) be used again to put payloads down on Mars. But new gear such as bigger chutes and SIADs will likely have to be included to slow really heavy stuff down enough for the sky crane to finish the job, Clark said. And that's where the LDSD project comes in.
"With the science and the technologies that we're testing here, we think we could double the mass that we land on Mars, which would go from something like the 1-ton Curiosity rover to something twice that," Clark told reporters during a pre-launch briefing in early June, adding that the gear could also help put payloads down more accurately and at higher elevations on the Red Planet than is currently possible.
The LDSD technologies should also be extensible, Clark said. For example, multiple 100-foot-wide chutes could work together, helping put human-scale payloads — such as habitat modules and other big pieces of infrastructure — down on Mars.
"We think that the parachute we're developing and testing is amenable to being used in clusters," Clark said. "Several parachutes at once create even more drag, and those kinds of things are the technologies that would enable the 20 to 30 tons that we're talking about."
The next stop for the LDSD gear will not be Mars, however. NASA plans at least two more flight tests out of Hawaii, both of which will likely happen in 2015.

Copyright © 2014 TechMediaNetwork.com All rights reserved.

Mars 'Flying Saucer' Splashes Down After NASA Test
LOS ANGELES — Jun 29, 2014, 5:54 AM ET
By CHRISTOPHER WEBER Associated Press

NASA has tested new technology designed to bring spacecraft — and one day even astronauts — safely down to Mars, with the agency declaring the experiment a qualified success even though a giant parachute got tangled on the way down.
Saturday's $150 million experiment is the first of three involving the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator vehicle. Tests are being conducted at high altitude on Earth to mimic descent through the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.
A balloon hauled the saucer-shaped craft 120,000 feet into the sky from a Navy missile range on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Then, the craft's own rocket boosted it to more than 30 miles high at supersonic speeds.
As the craft prepared to fall back to earth, a doughnut-shaped tube around it expanded like a Hawaiian puffer fish, creating atmospheric drag to dramatically slow it down from Mach 4, or four times the speed of sound.
Then the parachute unfurled — but only partially. The vehicle made a hard landing in the Pacific Ocean.
Engineers won't look at the parachute problem as a failure but as a way to learn more and apply that knowledge during future tests, said NASA engineer Dan Coatta with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"In a way, that's a more valuable experience for us than if everything had gone exactly according to plan," he said.
A ship was sent to recover a "black box" designed to separate from the vehicle and float. Outfitted with a GPS beacon, the box contains the crucial flight data that scientists are eager to analyze.
NASA planned to hold a news teleconference on the flight Sunday.
Since the twin Viking spacecraft landed on the red planet in 1976, NASA has relied on a parachute to slow landers and rovers.
But the latest experiment involved both the drag-inducing device and a parachute that was 110 feet in diameter — twice as large as the one that carried the 1-ton Curiosity rover in 2011.
Cutting-edge technologies are needed to safely land larger payloads on Mars, enabling delivery of supplies and materials "and to pave the way for future human explorers," a NASA statement said.
Technology development "is the surest path to Mars," said Michael Gazarik, head of space technology at NASA headquarters.
———
Associated Press Science Writer Alicia Chang contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Bum parachute mars NASA 'saucer' test flight
By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL Fla.
Sat Jun 28, 2014 6:07pm EDT

A high altitude balloon is released to launch a saucer-shaped test vehicle, which holds equipment for landing large payloads on Mars, at the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii June 28, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Marco Garcia

(Reuters) - A helium balloon carrying an experimental saucer-shaped NASA spacecraft floated off a launch tower at the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, on Saturday to test landing systems for future missions to Mars.
A novel inflatable shield to burn off speed worked but the test fell apart when a massive parachute, intended to guide the saucer to a splashdown in the ocean, failed to inflate properly.
"This is an opportunity for us to take a look at the data, learn what happened and apply that to the next test," NASA engineer Dan Coatta, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said during an interview on NASA Television.
"That's a more valuable experience for us than if everything had gone perfectly," he said. The balloon – big enough to fill the Rose Bowl football stadium in Pasadena, California – lifted off at 2:40 p.m. EDT (1840 GMT) and reached its designated altitude 120,000 feet (36,576 meters) above the Pacific Ocean about 2.5 hours later.
The launch, which had been delayed six times this month because of unsuitable weather, and the test were broadcast live on NASA Television.
The saucer-shaped Low Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD, successfully separated from the balloon and fired up its rocket motor, reaching speeds of 3,000 mph (4,828 kph) – roughly four times the speed of sound.
That set the stage for the real point of the test – collecting engineering data on a novel doughnut-shaped structure designed to quickly unfold, inflate and slow the craft's descent. The LDSD also held a massive supersonic parachute – the largest NASA has ever tested – that was to guide the craft to a controlled re-entry into the Pacific Ocean.
The 110-foot-diameter (34-meter) parachute failed to properly inflate, however, engineers monitoring the test said.
Recovery teams were standing by to pick up all the equipment splashing down in the ocean.
The point of the test flight was to put a prototype landing system through conditions that would be experienced on Mars.
"When we're actually going to use it for real, it's going to be on a spacecraft, entering the atmosphere of Mars at thousands of miles per hour, so we have to come up with some way on Earth to simulate that condition in order to prove that these things work," Coatta said.
The test is part of a larger technology-developing initiative to prepare to send heavier rovers and eventually human habitats to Mars.
NASA is spending about $200 million on the five-year project, which began in 2010. LDSD's next test is scheduled for next summer.
(Editing by Bill Trott)

Copyright © 2014 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Parachute Failure Mars NASA's LDSD Pacific Flight Test
Jun 28, 2014 by Mark Carreau in On Space
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NASA's Low Density Supersonic Decelerator test flight on Saturday was marred by a parachute failure that followed a successful launch and acceleration of the high altitude test vehicle from the U. S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range.
Recovery vessels were headed for the LDSD splashdown site northwest of Kauai, hopeful of recovering a "black box" with valuable flight data. The data recorder was designed to separate from the flight vehicle, float in the oceans waters. It was equipped with a GPS locator as well.
However, the recovery effort was expected to take one to two days, according to Dan Coatta, a NASA LDSD engineer who provided commentary during a space agency broadcast of the test flight.
NASA's Low Density Supersonic Decelerator test vehicle descends
beneath partially opened supersonic parachute. NASA TV

The three hour exercise got underway at 2:41 p.m., EDT, as the 856 foot tall helium balloon serving as the "first stage" for the flight ascended from the missile test range with the 6,900 pound saucer- shaped LDSD flight test vehicle in tow. The ascent to 120,000 feet was slow but appeared to go smoothly – though NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory flight control team tracked falling temperatures on the aft nozzle of the solid rocket motor bolted to the 15 ½ foot wide LDSD.

NASA's saucer-shaped low density supersonic decelerator rises to 120,000 feet
beneath balloon during Saturday's test flight. NASA TV.

After reaching 120,000 feet, the LDSD was released from the balloon at 5:05 p.m. The ignition of four spin motors quickly stabilized the saucer. The one minute ignition of the solid rocket motor accelerated the test vehicle to Mach 4, as the LDSD raced toward the test flight's 180,000 foot summit.
That was to be followed by the rapid inflation of the Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator that encircled the test vehicle like a belt. With the inflation of the Kevlar laced SIAD, the saucer was to expand from 15 ½ to 20 feet in width. The expansion was to increase the aerodynamic drag enough to slow the saucer to Mach 2.5, at which point a 100 foot wide supersonic parachute was to deploy and lower the test hardware to the Pacific Ocean.
Cameras aboard the LDSD showed the test vehicle intact as it descended beneath the chute, though all of the electronics were to turn off at 15,000 feet so the black box could store the flight data.
Currently, two more LDSD flight tests are planned in mid-2015. Engineers believe the SIAD and parachute technologies they are pursuing will replace those in use by NASA for risky Mars surface operations since the successful descent of the Viking probes in the mid-1970s.
Those capabilities appear to have peaked with the successful 2012 landing of the Curiosity rover, a one ton spacecraft.
The human exploration activities that NASA currently envisions for Mars in the 2030s would require landed payloads of 40,000 pounds for cargo missions and in support of astronaut landings.
Saturday's test met key objectives that should quality it as a success, according to Coatta, who outlined the criteria before the towering balloon and test vehicle left the ground.
"Our test goals were to inflate the balloon, launch, get up to altitude successfully, drop off the balloon, have our rocket motor fire and get up to speed," he said. "Everything beyond that point was the cherry on top."
The SIAD appeared to inflate successfully, NASA video indicated.
It appeared the parachute opened but inflated only partially. Its large size precluded extensive ground testing.
"This is sort of new territory we were in," said Coatta. "We have not tested this parachute in this way before. We went into this knowing it was a test. We had to do the test to see what happens."
The data recorder holds a "treasure trove" of pressure and temperature data as well as readings from force sensors and high definition video from the flight, he said.
Efforts to carry out the test in early to mid June were called off because of unseasonably high altitude winds that threatened to send the flight hardware flying over populated areas.
On Wednesday, NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate announced it would make further flight attempts during a window that opened Saturday and closed Thursday.
Copyright © 2014, Penton. All rights reserved.