NASA has successfully performed a flight test for its new Orion multipurpose crew vehicleon Wednesday even if only two of the three parachutes worked.
The flight test is the tenth among series of tests conducted on the multipurpose crew vehicle’ parachute system and is also the highest at 35,000 feet. The parachute was released above the Arizona desert. The crew cut the third parachute to see if the spacecraft can still work with two. The previous test was dropped at 25,000 feet in which the parachutes were opened at a height of 22,000 feet above ground. The latest test is now considered the best among all demonstrations in terms of parachute flight and landing.
"The closer we can get to actual flight conditions, the more confidence we gain in the system," said Chris Johnson, project manager for the Orion capsule parachute assembly system at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in a news release in NASA’s website. "What we saw today -- other than the failures we put in on purpose -- is very similar to what Orion will look like coming back during Exploration Flight Test-1's Earth entry next year."
The space agency plans to have the parachutes deployed 25,000 feet from the ground when the spacecraft returns to Earth from a space mission in the future.
The test aims to see the possible effects of a parachute malfunctioning so they can better prepare the spacecraft for such scenarios. They were able to prove that the Orion can still land safely even if it loses one parachute mid-air.
"We wanted to know what would happen if a cable got hooked around a sharp edge and snapped off when the parachutes deployed," said Stu McClung, Orion's landing and recovery system manager at Johnson. "We don't think that would ever happen, but if it did, would it cause other failures? We want to know everything that could possibly go wrong, so that we can fix it before it does."
The Orion spacecraft is set to be released in space in September 2014 on a mission called Exploration Flight Test-1(EFT-1). It is expected to travel at a speed of 20,000 mph and will land in the Pacific Ocean upon its return.
