NASA Tests Heaviest Chute Drop Ever

Iddo Genuth writes "NASA and the US Air Force have successfully tested a new super-chute system aimed at reclaiming reusable Ares booster rockets. On February 28, 2009 a 50,000-pound dummy rocket booster was dropped in the Arizona desert and slowed by a system of five parachutes before it crashed to the ground. The booster landed softly without any damage. This was possibly the heaviest parachute drop ever, and NASA is planning to perform even heavier drops of up to 90,000 pounds in the next few months."

Comments

Re:1 Question

[Experiment 626]

When will America start using SI units as the standard? Pounds don't mean anything to me.

Translation: "I am too stupid to do unit conversions with Google."

But at least I've learned that whining about things not conforming to a more widespread system is a good way to get "insightful" mods. When will China start using the roman alphabet as the standard? Hanzi characters don't mean anything to me. When will Linux start using cmd.exe as the standard? /bin/bash doesn't mean anything to me.

Re:Astroid Net?

[d3ac0n]

You make an excellent point, but you also fail to take into consideration how much energy will not be transferred via the asteroid bits that simply miss the earth due to being blasted off into space by the force of the nuclear detonation. It just seems logical that reducing a large single mass strike down to a smaller mass spread out over a wide area is going to be significantly less damaging. Also, any heat transferred to the atmosphere is going to be transferred primarily to the upper atmosphere, where it is much more likely to simply bleed back into space.

Also, if the choice is between being exposed to a laser vs being exposed to the same amount of energy in a heat lamp form over several days (or weeks, or months) then thank you, I'll take the heat lamp.