WASHINGTON — An institute in Japan’s space agency is pursuing a concept that could allow the agency to send small rovers to the surface of Mars.
In a talk at a plenary session of the National Academies’ Space Science Week April 1, Masaki Fujimoto, the new director general of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences (ISAS) within the Japanese space agency JAXA, said the agency was working with a company on a concept using inflatable decelerators to land spacecraft on Mars.
The approach, he said, would combine technologies the agency has developed for its upcoming Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission to collect samples from the Martian moon Phobos with those from the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) spacecraft that achieved a pinpoint landing on the moon despite a thruster malfunction in January 2024.
“Recently, we have come to realize that maybe we have the key technology,” he said, combining capabilities from MMX and SLIM along with new work on an inflatable soft aeroshell that would handle much of the entry, descent and landing phases of a Mars mission.
“Instead of having a complicated operational supersonic parachute and a hard aeroshell, you can do all the job just with this single technology,” he said of the inflatable aeroshell. “If we’re focusing on small missions, this is the key technology for enabling our way of Mars landing missions.”
In that approach, the aeroshell would deliver spacecraft through the Martian atmosphere to the surface, with thrusters for the final leg of the landing attempt. He said ISAS envisions using it to deliver rovers weighing 100 to 200 kilograms to the surface.
He did not go into technical details about the aeroshell, although the concept is similar to hypersonic inflatable decelerators NASA has tested, including the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) project that successfully flew in 2022. United Launch Alliance is adapting the technology for future use recovering the engine section of its Vulcan boosters.
Work on the inflatable aeroshell is being supported by the Space Strategic Fund, an initiative by the Japanese government that is offering one trillion yen ($6.7 billion) over 10 years to advance key space technologies. Fujimoto said the inflatable aeroshell is one of the projects supported by the fund, with an award to a company he did not identify in his online presentation to work on the technology.
“We did have the basic idea, but then there was a commercial company that said that they could cooperate,” he said, but did not give a timetable for when the technology might be ready to fly a Mars mission. “It’s beginning to materialize now.”
