CUSF Parachute Deployment Test

From the creator

The second prize winner in the Carl Zeiss video competition at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, was Cambridge University Spaceflight's first-hand view of a parachute being released on the edge of space. The team tested parachutes for the ExoMos lander, a European-led robotic mission to Mars currently under development by NASA and the European Space Agency. The video shows the parachute re-entering the Earth's atmosphere from the edge of space at a robust 450mph. "Six Minutes of Terror" is how engineers describe the process of Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) on Mars. It is perhaps the most challenging part of any mars lander mission, a complex ballet of heat shields, parachutes, retro-rockets and airbags, all having to assemble themselves mid-air; a failure in any one part would lead to almost certain mission failure. Simulating this is no easy task, a parachute is a complex, fabric structure opening into a fluid flow and so real hardware testing is essential. However, Mars has an atmosphere more than one hundred times thinner than Earth's, and re-creating these high velocity, low density flows in a wind tunnel is a hugely expensive, if not impossible, task. The Spaceflight team's testing method has not only been successful but is an extremely cost effective way to test parachutes in a Mars-like environment. Using their experience with high altitude scientific balloons and instrumentation, the CU Spaceflight team built a balloon-lofted vehicle, packe

Published 2011-11-10 · Watch on YouTube ↗
Availability and playback restrictions are controlled by the original channel.