NASA Team to Test New Vehicle-Descent Technologies

NASA technologists will get a chance next summer to relive the good old days when Agency engineers would affix space-age gizmos to rockets just to see if the contraptions worked.

In what will be the first of four high-altitude balloon flights to begin in the summer of 2013, technologists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., are preparing to test new deceleration devices that could replace current descent technologies for landing ever-larger payloads at higher elevations on Mars.

NASA hasn't tested deceleration technologies supersonically since 1972 when it conducted four high-altitude tests of a supersonic parachute used during the Viking program. "We’ve been stuck with that design ever since," said Mark Adler, NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program lead. NASA will use the same technology again this year when it delivers the Curiosity rover to Mars.

NASA's IceBridge 2012 Arctic Campaign Takes to the Skies

Researchers and flight crew with NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne mission to study changes in polar ice, began another season of science activity with the start of the 2012 Arctic campaign on March 13. From mid-March through mid-May, a modified P-3 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., will conduct daily missions out of Thule and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland with one flight to Fairbanks, Alaska and back to measure sea and land ice. The campaign will also feature instrument tests, continued international collaboration and educational activities.

After NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite's (ICESat) stopped collecting data in 2009, Operation IceBridge began as a way to continue the multi-year record of ice elevation measurements until the launch of ICESat-2 in 2016. IceBridge gathers data during annual campaigns over the Arctic starting in March and Antarctic starting in October.

IceBridge flights will measure both previously surveyed sites, such as Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier, and unstudied areas of sea ice, such as the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska. "The most important sea ice flights are the transits between Thule and Fairbanks," said IceBridge project scientist Michael Studinger.