Rigorously wrapped inside this donut-shaped bag is a 35-m diameter parachute about to be baked inside a specialised dry heater steriliser oven.
This 74 kg parachute, made largely of nylon and Kevlar materials, will endure a six-minute dive into the skinny martian ambiance and decelerate the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover for a protected touchdown on Mars. This feat will make it the biggest parachute ever to fly on the Crimson Planet or anyplace else within the Photo voltaic System moreover Earth.
The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission will launch in 2028 and spend over 25 months travelling to the Crimson Planet the place it should seek for indicators of life beneath the martian floor.
The potential existence of previous and maybe even present-day life on our closest planetary neighbour requires rigorous sterilisation, to be sure that no microbes piggyback their approach there from Earth. Any terrestrial microbes hardy sufficient to outlive the trip by means of house would intervene with the investigation by inflicting ‘ahead contamination’ and triggering a false optimistic.
However this isn’t the one purpose why the parachute must be not less than 10 000 occasions cleaner than your smartphone – defending the martian atmosphere from ourselves, in accordance with worldwide planetary protection measures, is as essential as defending the mission.
To do away with any microbes it might need picked up throughout its time on Earth, the parachute might be heated up in a specialised oven on the European House Company’s Life Support and Physical Sciences Laboratory at ESTEC, the company’s technical centre within the Netherlands.
As step-by-step directions on baking an ExoMars parachute are usually not available, the laboratory’s consultants had to make use of its precise copies to establish the best parameters. By means of a number of rounds of testing, they discovered that sterilising at 125°C for 36 hours – following a 50-hour preheating process to verify even the innermost components of the parachute attain that temperature – leads to a parachute clear sufficient to fulfill all planetary safety necessities.
Till now, the method might need resembled baking a cake in your kitchen – however that is the place the similarities finish. In contrast to your oven, ESA’s dry heater steriliser is situated in an ‘ISO Class 1’ cleanroom, one of many cleanest locations in Europe. All air contained in the room constantly passes by means of a two-stage filter, and everybody coming into the chamber has to robe up extra rigorously than a surgeon earlier than passing by means of an air bathe to take away any contaminants.
After popping out of the oven, the parachute was given just a few hours to chill down earlier than the lab staff suited up and thoroughly packaged it contained in the cleanroom. As soon as sealed inside a protecting wrapping, the squeaky-clean parachute was despatched again to its makers at Thales Alenia House in Turin, Italy, the place it awaits spacecraft integration.
Final 12 months, a exact copy of the parachute was deployed throughout a high-altitude balloon drop check, efficiently slowing down an ExoMars mock-up touchdown platform for a protected landing on Earth.
Watch ESA’s Mars chief engineer Albert Haldemann clarify the baking course of and why it’s a large step for the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission.
