For its latest Orion test run, NASA intended for the parachute system to fail partially in order to see how the spacecraft could handle being a bit shorthanded.
According to The Orlando Sentinel, NASA used a replica of the Orion Spacecraft up to an altitude of 35,000 feet over the desert in Arizona. Of the system that contains 11 parachutes in all, two of the final five to be deployed were meant to malfunction.
Those five parachutes go off when Orion is about 8,000 feet off the ground and NASA engineers wanted to see if the spacecraft not only could survive such a malfunction, but manage a safe landing.
NASA believes the test run to be a success, The Sentinel reported, which bodes well for the eventual manned mission to Mars. NASA envisions Orion to be the vehicle that lands astronauts on the Red Planet, so accuracy and thoroughness in these test runs is of high priority.
"We test Orion's parachutes to the extremes to ensure we have a safe system for bringing crews back to Earth on future flights, even if something goes wrong," CJ Johnson, project manager for Orion's parachute system, told The Sentinel. "Orion's parachute performance is difficult to model with computers, so putting them to the test in the air helps us better evaluate and predict how the system works."
The Verge was at the test run and made several images available online here. You can also see a video of the test run here.
