Nasa Mars Rover Curiosity's Heat Shield, Meet Mars - YouTube

This sequence of images shows the heat shield from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory hitting the ground on Mars and raising a cloud of dust.

The images were taken by the Mars Descent Imager on the mission's Curiosity rover while the rover was still suspended on a parachute, after the spacecraft had jettisoned the heat shield.

A dark spot, the shadow of the heat shield, enters the scene from lower left, moving toward the center. The bright heat shield itself is also apparent just before the shadow and hardware meet in the impact on the surface.

The area of ground visible in the images is about six-tenths of a mile (1 kilometer) across. The frames shown here are cropped portions of full-frame images from the Mars Descent Imager.

The sequence includes 25 frames, repeated in five run-throughs for this presentation. The action is full speed in the first, fourth and fifth run-throughs. It is one-half and one-eighth speeds in the second and third run-throughs.

Copenhagen Suborbitals Test Launch: Capsule Survives – Mostly

On August 12, Copenhagen Suborbitals conducted a scheduled test of their Tycho Deep Space Capsule launch escape system.

The launch went according to plan, but not so the landing.

The spacecraft went into a tumble before dropping the capsule into the Baltic Sea at shield-crunching speeds.

“We had perfect launch, but quickly the entire configuration began to tumble,” said Kristian von Bengtson, co-founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals.

“The main chutes clearly did not have complete deployment and the capsule hit water in high speed, buckling the bottom shield.”

NASA Mars: Rover Curiosity's Heat Shield in View

This colour thumbnail image was obtained by NASA's Curiosity rover during its descent to the surface of Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT).

The image was obtained by the Mars Descent Imager instrument known as MARDI and shows the 15-foot (4.5-meter) diameter heat shield when it was about 50 feet (16 meters) from the spacecraft.

It was obtained two and one-half minutes before touching down on the surface of Mars and about three seconds after heat shield separation.

It is among the first color images Curiosity sent back from Mars.

The resolution of all of the MARDI frames is reduced by a factor of eight in order for them to be promptly received on Earth during this early phase of the mission.

Full resolution (1,600 by 1,200 pixel) images will be returned to Earth over the next several months as Curiosity begins its scientific exploration of Mars.

The original image from MARDI has been geometrically corrected to look flat.

Curiosity landed inside of a crater known as Gale Crater.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA to test IRVE-3 Inflatable Re-entry system

Your spacecraft is falling from the skies at an initial speed of Mach 25.

Your reentry heat shield, that has to survive a 7,800 degrees Celsius (14,072° F) plasma shock, is a finely tuned hi-tech amalgam of refractory metals and carbides and reinforced carbon-carbon ablation materials.

Care to replace your mighty heat shield with a balloon? Not likely! But that is exactly what NASA is considering.

This summer, the third in a series of NASA suborbital test flights will attempt to demonstrate the feasibility of inflatable spacecraft.

The Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) is scheduled for a suborbital test flight from the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore later this northern summer.

Part of the Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) project within NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist's Game Changing Development (GCD) Program, IRVE-3 is one of NASA's many projects to develop new technologies to advance space travel.

Tile Makers Creating Orion Shield

Workers recently began cutting and coating the first thermal protection system tiles - part of the heat shield that will protect an Orion spacecraft during an upcoming flight test which will simulate the re-entry speed and heating of returning from deep space.

The tiles are made of the same material and coating as those used on the space shuttle's belly.

On Orion, however, the tiles will be placed along the sides and top of the conical spacecraft.

A separate heat shield akin to the ablative design used during Apollo is being developed to protect the bottom of the spacecraft, which will encounter the highest temperatures.

The manufacturing work at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., marks an important time in the progression of the spacecraft following the shuttle's retirement in 2011, said Thermal Protection System, or TPS, engineers Joy Huff and Sarah Cox.

"We're making something that's going to fly again, which is what we were doing for years," Huff said.

There are about 40 people involved in the tile work: 20 to make the tiles and 20 to install them.

"We're at the starting line," Cox said. "It's going to take some time to get all the parts fabricated."

The same shop that manufactured space shuttle tiles will make the 1,300 tiles needed for the Orion flight.

It is not fast work. In fact, workers will spend about 11 months shaping the insulating blocks and laying on a heat-resistant, ceramic coating.

They use a 5-axis mill loaded with precise dimensions to cut blank tiles to their shapes. So far, the shop has finished 33 tiles.

Many of the tiles will have special cutouts for instruments to collect data during the flight test. Many fewer cutouts will be needed for future missions.

In an advancement from the shuttle days, each tile's dimensions are sent over digitally from Orion builder Lockheed Martin and the final tile is photographed with a 3-D camera so computers can fit the pieces together virtually before they are placed together physically, Huff said. The details are far more exact than in the past.

"They've had such good success that (technicians) are going to eliminate one pre-fit step," Huff said.

The comparisons with the tile work for the space shuttles are plentiful. For example, the smaller Orion uses tiles that average 8-inches by 8-inches compared to the shuttle's 6-inches by 6-inches.

Also, Orion's design allows for many of the tiles to be the same dimensions with the same part number, but each shuttle tile was a unique configuration unto itself, with individual part numbers.

"That's a huge improvement over shuttle," Huff said. "Even having nine or 10 of the same part is a big improvement."

Perhaps the biggest comparison, though, is the sheer number of tiles involved. A space shuttle heat shield required more than 23,000 tiles to the Orion's 1,300.

"It's smaller, so there's less parts," Cox said.

NASA Mars Rover: Opportunity's Heat Shield

This image from 2005 shows the remains of the heat shield from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

The picture reveals that it is broken into two key pieces, the main piece on the left side and a broken-off flank piece near the middle of the image.

The heat shield impact site is identified by the circle of red dust on the right side of the picture.

In this view, Opportunity is approximately 66 feet (20 meters) from the heat shield, which protected it while hurtling through the Martian atmosphere.

In the far left of the image, a meteorite called 'Heat Shield Rock' sits nearby, as the sun reflected off the silver-colored underside of the internal thermal blankets of the heat shield.

The rover spent 36 sols investigating how the severe heating during entry through the atmosphere affected the heat shield. The most obvious is the fact that the heat shield inverted upon impact.

This is an approximately true-color rendering of the scene acquired around 1:22 p.m. local solar time on Opportunity sol 324 (Dec. 21, 2004) in an image mosaic using panoramic filters at wavelengths of 750, 530, and 430 nanometers. Opportunity has now spent more than 2,680 sols, or Martian days, on the Red Planet.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

NASA Mars Science Lab: Biggest-Ever Heat Shield Prepared for Mars Spacecraft

The heat shield for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory is the largest ever built for a planetary mission.

This image shows the heat shield being prepared at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, in April 2011. The heat shield was delivered to NASA Kennedy Space Center, Fla., on May 12, 2011, together with the mission's back shell and cruise stage.

The heat shield and back shell, which together form the spacecraft's areoshell, have a diameter of 4.5 meters (nearly 15 feet).

Mars Science Laboratory will launch in late 2011. The mission's rover, Curiosity, will land on Mars in August 2012. It will study whether an intriguing area of Mars has offered environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life and for preserving evidence of whether life existed there.

The aeroshell will encapsulate and protect Curiosity from intense heat and friction generated during descent through the Martian atmosphere.

Technicians in the photo are installing electronics of an instrument for collecting data about temperature and pressure during descent through the atmosphere.

This instrument is the Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent and Landing Instrument (MEDLI).

It was developed by NASA's Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va., in partnership with NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

The white area near the centre of the heat shield will serve for calibration of the mission's Mars Descent Imager as the heat shield drops away from the rover during descent. The camera will then record a high-definition colour video of the ground until moments after touch down.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin

Heat Shield of Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV)

Work on the heat shield and thermal protection backshell of the Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle ground test article, or GTA, was completed in preparation for environmental testing.

This image is of the crew vehicle at the Lockheed Martin Vertical Test Facility in Colorado. The crew vehicle will undergo rigorous testing to confirm its ability to safely fly astronauts through all the harsh environments of deep space exploration missions.

Image Credit: Lockheed Martin

Inflatable Heat Shield Tested in Space

An inflatable heat shield was successfully tested on Monday, demonstrating for the first time that these light, flexible devices could be used to protect spacecraft on their way through planets' atmospheres.

Other spacecraft use solid heat shields that either drop away as the spacecraft near the surface, as happened with the Mars rovers, or gradually erode in the atmosphere.

These solid shields are heavy, and their weight limits the mass of the spacecraft they are designed to protect, since both must launch on the same rocket. Their physical size is also limiting, since the shields must be small enough to fit inside a launch rocket.

Balloon-like shields can in theory sidestep these issues, since they are lightweight and can inflate to relatively large sizes after being folded up during launch. These weight and size savings allow for heavier spacecraft payloads.

The new shield, called the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE), launched aboard a small rocket on Monday morning from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. It was the first successful test of an inflatable heat shield.

"We're totally thrilled with the data results we've received," says project manager Mary-Beth Wusk of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.