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.
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