NASA engineers successfully conducted the second to last splashdown tests with the Orion spacecraft on Thursday (August 25) bringing the agency one step closer to its goal of eventually carrying humans to Mars.
The test, conducted at the Langley facility in Hampton, Virginia was designed to simulate one of the Orion spacecraft’s most stressful landing scenarios with crash test dummies inside, a case where one of the capsule’s three main parachutes fails to deploy. That would cause Orion to approach its planned water landing faster than normal and at an undesirable angle.
With Thursday’s success and one final drop in this series scheduled for mid-September, researchers have accumulated a lot of important information.
For each test, they have captured data flowing in through about 535 channels. Each channel represent a sensor calibrated to measure the spacecraft’s behavior and condition as well as the experience of its inanimate crew of two heavily instrumented crash test dummies.
The sensors are capable of gathering 10.7 million pieces of high-fidelity data every second.
Since testing began in April, the project has stockpiled 99 percent of its target data, and covered most of the splashdown scenarios originally mapped out.
NASA is working to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030’s. (Reuters)