NASA is working on lightweight, inflatable flying saucers that will help spacecrafts land on Mars at a slower and safer pace.
Astronauts would be able to land bigger and heavier spacecrafts on the Red Planet without the need to carry large amounts of extra fuel or huge atmospheric fields, according to Gizmag.
The lack of friction on Mars makes landing spacecrafts on the planet difficult. The space agency mostly uses parachute-based deceleration systems for landings.
But NASA must use a different method for landing bigger spacecrafts, The Los Angeles Times reported. As a result, the agency is developing a project called Low-Density Supersonic Decelerators (LDSD), which aims to put flying saucers to use.
The project includes an atmospheric entry vehicle with a giant parachute 100 feet in diameter and two saucers that can inflate in a fraction of a second. An inner tube will change the diameter of the saucer from 15 feet to 20 feet, which allows the vehicle to land slowly enough to deploy the parachute.
The saucers, called Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerators (SIADs) will be fitted around the rim of the vehicle, Gizmag reported.
NASA said that LDSD would not only land larger craft with more precision on Mars, but the flying saucers could also help payloads land at higher altitudes, giving them access to more of the planet's surface. Decelerators can be further updated to land spacecrafts on other planets.
The saucers will inflate once the vehicle is moving at 3.5 times the speed of sound, and will slow the speed down to 2.5 times the speed of sound, which is when the parachute will be released, The Los Angeles Times reported.
"It's still extremely experimental, and we are pushing beyond any technologies that we already have," said Ian Clark, principal investigator for LDSD. "If it all goes successfully, it means we weren't pushing hard enough."
NASA is scheduled to test LDSD this June at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, Gizmag reported.
The agency is aiming to use LDSD for missions as soon as 2020.
