Landing the car-sized Curiosity rover on Mars was difficult enough, but what about when you want to go bigger? What about when you want to carry people to Mars? To test landing a larger payload on the Red Planet, NASA yesterday sent a flying saucer-like craft called the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator 180,000 feet into the Earth’s atmosphere over Hawaii and then dropped it. The craft, dubbed Keiki o ka honua, or “child from earth” in Hawaiian, was equipped with a donut-shaped “Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator,” which deployed first to create drag, slowing down the craft to just 2.5 times the speed of sound. Then, the LDSD deployed NASA’s largest supersonic parachute yet.
