Proposed ExoMars Parachute Tested

A collaboration of researchers has recently been able to complete simulations of a massive parachute, that will help deploy a new space vehicle on the surface of Mars. The tests have thus far proven successful, and the team is pushing to run even more assessments.

With the European Space Agency (ESA) planning to send the large ExoMars rover to the surface of the Red Planet, the issue of how the spacecraft will get through the Martian atmosphere is becoming increasingly important.

In order to assess the proposed parachute system, experts with the Cambridge University Spaceflight (CUSF) team have just finished studying models of the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) system.

As a proxy for a Martian landing, the team used Earth’s atmosphere, through which they plunged a vehicle at a speed of 450 miles per hour. While this test was going on, experts at CUSF, in collaboration with colleagues at ESA, were assessing the performances the parachute displayed.

According to those involved in the ExoMars project, the entire EDL stage of the mission will last for only a brief period. However, the team refers to this as the “Six Minutes of Terror.” During that time, numerous systems will have to work together.

The descent module is protected by heat shields, and must be guided by a complex interplay of parachutes, airbags, retro-rockets and so on. If any of these systems fail, then the entire mission will most certainly be doomed, and the rover destroyed.

“The Spaceflight team’s testing method has not only been successful but is an extremely cost effective way to test parachutes in a Mars-like environment,” explains Cambridge fourth-year undergraduate Iain Waugh, a member of the research group.

“Mars has an atmosphere more than one hundred times thinner than Earth’s, and re-creating these high velocity, low density flows in a wind tunnel is a hugely expensive, if not impossible, task,” he adds.

The team managed to achieve a simulation cost of only £1000 per launch, which is significantly less than the $250,000 these tests usually cost. This will allow them to conduct numerous modeling sessions before the real parachute for ExoMars will be built.

Students at Cambridge took the first place in the Best Student Paper competition at the 21st AIAA Aerodynamic Decelerator Systems Conference in Dublin, where they also presented their results thus far.