Thar she blows: NASA’s mega-parachute in action.
NASA
This is the fastest deployment of a parachute in history.
The chute, which weighed 81 kilograms, was strapped to a a section of a NASA Black Brandt IX sounding rocket, which separated, as planned, once the 17.7 metre high craft reached an altitude of 38 kilometres above the ground – a distance covered in just two minutes.
The parachute took a mere four-tenths of a second to fully expand.
The test was part of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE) project, designed to fine-tune equipment for the agency’s planned 2020 mission to Mars.