AssetID: 52935406
Headline: NASA Successfully Test Rocket That Will Bring Samples Back From Mars
Caption: **RAW VIDEO** NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) recently reached some major milestones in support of the Mars Sample Return program. The team developing MAV conducted successful tests of the first and second stage solid rocket motors needed for the launch. This image and this video footage shows a development motor based on the second-stage solid rocket motor design for NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle undergoes testing March 29, 2023, at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Elkton, Maryland. The two-stage MAV rocket is an important part of the joint plan between NASA and ESA to bring scientifically-selected Martian samples to Earth in the early 2030s. Managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, MAV is currently set to launch in June 2028, with the samples set to arrive on Earth in the early 2030s. The vehicle will travel aboard the Sample Retrieval Lander during launch from Earth, a two-year journey to Mars, and nearly a year of receiving samples collected by Perseverance. After the Sample Transfer Arm on the lander loads the samples from Perseverance into a sample container in the nose of the rocket, the MAV will launch from Mars into orbit around the planet, releasing the sample container for the Earth Return Orbiter to capture. The MAV launch will be accomplished using two solid rocket motors – SRM1 and SRM2. SRM1 will propel MAV away from the Red Planet’s surface, while SRM2 will spin MAV’s second stage to place the sample container in the correct Mars orbit, allowing the Earth Return Orbiter to find it. To test the solid rocket motor designs, the MAV team prepared development motors. This allowed the team to see how the motors will perform and if any adjustments should be made before they are built for the mission. The SRM2 development motor was tested on March 29, 2023, at the Northrop Grumman facility in Elkton, Maryland. Then, SRM1’s development motor was tested on April 7 at Edwards Air Force Base in California. SRM1’s test was conducted in a vacuum chamber that was cooled to minus-20 degrees Celsius (minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit) and allowed the team to also test a supersonic splitline nozzle, part of SRM1’s thrust vector control system. Most gimballing solid rocket motor nozzles are designed in a way that can’t handle the extreme cold MAV will experience, so the Northrop Grumman team had to come up with something that could: a state-of-the-art trapped ball nozzle featuring a supersonic split line. After testing and disassembling the SRM1 development motor, analysis showed the team’s ingenuity proved successful. “This test demonstrates our nation has the capacity to develop a launch vehicle that can successfully be lightweight enough to get to Mars and robust enough to put a set of samples into orbit to bring back to Earth,” said MAV Propulsion Manager Benjamin Davis at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “The hardware is telling us that our technology is ready to proceed with development.”
Keywords: nasa,space,science,engine,rocket,mars,astronomy,planets,milky way,red planet,feature
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