Strongest supersonic parachute

The strongest supersonic parachute is the SR03 test article, developed for NASA's Mars 2020 Rover (aka Perseverance). The SR03 parachute, which was built by Airborne Systems (USA), withstood a peak load of 67,336 lbf (299.52 kN) at Mach 1.85 during atmospheric testing on 7 September 2018.

The basic design for the parachutes used for Mars landers – called a Disk-Gap-Band (DGB) supersonic parachute – was developed in the 1970s for the Viking 1 mission. All subsequent NASA Mars landers have used some variation on this design, scaling it for the expected payload. For Mars 2020, however, NASA's engineers decided that they should re-test some refinements to the 40-year-old DGB design, given the record-breaking mass of the lander/rover (1,026.4 kg; 2,262.8 lb).

The SR03 followed the same tried-and-tested form of the earlier DGB parachutes, but used stronger materials (nylon, kevlar and technora) and a reinforced design. It weighed 88-kg (compared to 54 kg for the older design) and was packed into a metal cylinder so tightly it had the density of wood.

The parachute was tested as part of a NASA program called ASPIRE (Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment). This saw NASA engineers launch three test parachutes to an altitude of 121,000 ft (37,000 m) between October 2017 and September 2018. The first was an exact replica of the one used to set down Curiosity in 2012, while the second two were Airborne Systems' new design. The parachutes were carried up by Terrier/Black Brant IX sounding rockets, then deployed at an altitude where the air pressure is equal to the atmospheric pressure on Mars.

The SR03 deployed while the rocket payload was moving at Mach 1.85, explosively inflating from a cylinder about the size of a beer keg to a canopy around 21.5 m wide (70 ft) in 0.4 seconds. The 67,336-lbf load experienced by the SR03 parachute is 1.85 times greater than the forces the final version is expected to experience during the landing of the Perseverance rover.