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| [PHOTO: NASA] |
Houston: NASA completed the latest in a series of parachute tests for
its Orion spacecraft Thursday at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in
southwestern Arizona, marking another step toward a first flight test in 2014.
The test verified Orion can land safely even if one of its two drogue
parachutes does not open during descent.
Orion will take
humans farther into space than ever before, but one of the most challenging
things the multipurpose vehicle will do is bring its crew home safely. Because
it will return from greater distances, Orion will reenter the Earth's
atmosphere at speeds of more than 20,000 mph. After re-entry, the parachutes
are all that will lower the capsule carrying astronauts back to Earth.
"The mockup
vehicle landed safely in the desert and everything went as planned," said
Chris Johnson, a NASA project manager for Orion's parachute assembly system.
"We designed the parachute system so nothing will go wrong, but plan and
test as though something will so we can make sure Orion is the safest vehicle
ever to take humans to space."
Orion uses five
parachutes. Three are main parachutes measuring 116 feet wide and two are
drogue parachutes measuring 23 feet wide. The 21,000-pound capsule needs only
two main parachutes and one drogue. The extra two provide a backup in case one
of the primary parachutes fails.
To verify Orion could
land safely with only one drogue parachute, engineers dropped a spacecraft
mockup from a plane 25,000 feet above the Arizona desert and simulated a
failure of one of the drogues. About 30 seconds into the mockup's fall, the
second drogue parachute opened and slowed the mockup down enough for the three
main parachutes to take over the descent.
The next Orion
parachute test is scheduled for February and will simulate a failure of one of
the three main parachutes.
In 2014, an uncrewed
Orion spacecraft will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida
on Exploration Flight Test-1. The spacecraft will travel 3,600 miles above
Earth's surface. This is 15 times farther than the International Space
Station's orbit and farther than any spacecraft designed to carry humans has
gone in more than 40 years. The main flight objective is to test Orion's heat
shield performance at speeds generated during a return from deep space.