SHIELD, NASA’s Next Martian Lander Will Not Land, It Will Crash!

NASA is the space agency that can boast the most successes when it comes to the ability to land with a half-moon on Mars, however it is known that the operation is truly energy-intensive and difficult to manage. Only China managed to surprise everyone with a successful first attempt when it sent the Zhurong rover to Mars, but of course the experience of the American space agency has certainly helped to tackle the problem in the best way.

We were all struck by the accuracy with which the famous 7 minutes of terror were dealt with during the arrival of the Perseverance rover on the red planet in 2021, but what if there was an easier and ‘less elaborate’ way to achieve the same result?

Apparently NASA is thinking about it and maybe he considered a mode that no one would ever think ofwhich is the opposite of what it has done up to now. No controlled landing but a real crash!

Rather than slowing a spacecraft’s high-speed descent, there is an experimental lander project called SHIELD (Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device), which would use an accordion-shaped collapsible base designed to act as a deformation zone capable of absorbing it. strong impact energy. This apparently absurd solution could drastically reduce the costs of invios on Marsof a land vehicle, simplifying the harrowing process of entry, descent and landing and expanding the options for possible arrival sites have not been taken into consideration to date due to the often inadequate terrain characteristics.

Here is what Louis Giersch, project manager of SHIELD, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California thinks.

“We think we could go to more dangerous areas, where we wouldn’t want to risk placing a billion dollar rover with our current landing systems. Maybe we could even land several of these in various hard-to-access locations to build a network.”

Behind the development of SHIELD is much of the progress made with NASA’s Mars Sample Return campaign. We’ve told you about this many times before, but it doesn’t hurt to remember that the first step of the sample recovery campaign started with the collection by the rover Perseverance of small rock elements that were sealed in airtight metal tubes. A future spacecraft will bring those samples back to Earth inside a small capsule and crash safely in a deserted location.

The study of this mission led the engineers to wonder if the general idea was reversible, and in this regard, Velibor Ćormarkovic, a member of JPL’s SHIELD team, tells us very well.

“If you want to land something hard on Earth, why can’t you do it the other way around for Mars? And if we can make a hard landing on Mars, we know that SHIELD could work on planets or moons with denser atmospheres.”

To test the theory, the engineers had to prove that SHIELD can succeed inmore complex and demanding task, namely to protect sensitive electronics during landing. Testing began, for which the responsible team began using a drop tower available from JPL to test how Perseverance’s sample tubes would withstand a hard landing on Earth.

The tower has a height of almost 27 meters and is equipped with a giant harness calledarc launch systemwhich can hurl an object to the surface at the same speeds reached during a landing on Mars.

Ćormarkovic is not new to similar experiences, having previously worked on tests for the automotive industry, during which, for example, dummies are subjected to tests against walls, deformable barriers, and other elements to evaluate strength and safety. We use verses and their own sled systems, or tracks, which accelerate the body prototypes until the threshold speed is reached, used to evaluate the real resistance and possible damage to the people housed inside the future passenger compartment.

“The tests we did for SHIELD are kind of a vertical version of the tests with a sled system. But instead of a wall, the sudden stop due to an impact in the ground.”

On August 12, the team gathered at the launch tower with a life-size prototype of SHIELD’s collapsible attenuator, which appears as an inverted pyramid of metal rings designed to absorb impact. They hung the attenuator on a grappling hook andthey inserted a smartphone, a radio and an accelerometer to simulate electronicspotentially present on board a spacecraft.

The pitcher was able to push SHIELD towards the ground at approximately 177 kilometers per hourroughly the same with which a lander reaches the surface of Mars after being slowed down by atmospheric resistance, compared to its initial velocity of 23,335 kilometers per hour when it enters the atmosphere of Mars.

Previous SHIELD tests relied on a landed landing zone, but for this test it was decided to be more daring and the team decided to stiffen everything through the use of a 5 cm thick steel plate, which was placed on the ground to experiment a landing. even harder than a spacecraft would experience on Martian terrain. The onboard accelerometer revealed that SHIELD hadan impact with a force of about 1 million newtonswhich to convey the idea, as if an object of 112 tons that had crashed against it.

Camera footage confirmed that SHIELD hit the ground at a slight angle, then bounced around 1 meter in the air before capsizing. The team suspects that this behavior was caused by the steel plate, as such a bounce had never occurred in previous tests carried out on the ground.

But the great news is about the hardware used as a test, and after opening the prototype and recovering the payload, the team discovered that all the devices on board had survived, even the smartphone! Although NASA has not provided precise details on this, we would like to know the model used and the additional protection mechanisms, which have certainly been adopted to avert the worst. A rugged phone or a protective case shouldn’t work miracles in similar situations, so we will investigate the matter and if we discover additional details we will inform you.

After the goodness of these results, the idea of ​​working further on the project is strengthened, so the responsible teams will work on the construction of a real lander based on these principles, to be tested in 2023 and see to what extent this idea can materialize.