00:00There's been a lot of talk about Orion's heat shield during Artemis II's return to
00:04Earth.
00:04But what about the parachutes?
00:06Well, I got to speak with someone who knows all about them.
00:09Jared Dahm, Parachute System Manager for Artemis II.
00:12What is all this stuff on this table before us?
00:14We've got two of our parachutes here, small ribbon parachutes, the forward bay cover parachute
00:19and a pilot parachute.
00:20And behind me we have hanging a sample of our large main parachutes.
00:24Starting at about 24,000 feet, we'll see our first three parachutes, our forward bay
00:28cover parachutes, and their only job is to lift the forward bay cover off the vehicle
00:33to expose the rest of our pyrotechnics and parachutes.
00:35The design of the parachute is kind of a trade between how much deceleration you get and what
00:40your final descent rate is versus how stable it is.
00:43Our initial parachutes, our forward bay covers, which remove the forward bay cover, our pilots
00:49and our drogues, those are all ribbon parachutes, which are stable, strong, and reliable.
00:54Following the forward bay cover parachutes, we've got the two drogue parachutes, and those
00:58will decelerate the vehicle from about 350 miles per hour down to about 150 miles per
01:04hour.
01:04At that point, we'll have pyrotechnic cutters that sever the riser of those parachutes and
01:08we'll mortar deploy three more parachutes, the pilots, which we see right here.
01:12And the only job of these pilots is to pull out our three 300 pound, 11,000 square feet mains.
01:19We actually have pyrotechnics inside the parachutes to control that deceleration.
01:23For example, our main parachutes, when we initially deploy them, they'll look long, kind of like
01:29a hot dog.
01:30And eight seconds after deployment, a pyrotechnic cutter will sever that line, allow it to get
01:35a little bit bigger, and then it'll take more of a light bulb shape.
01:37These are our reefing line cutters.
01:39These are the pyrotechnics that actually actuate that.
01:41So on deployment of the parachute, a pin is pulled, and that starts a burning fuse, then
01:47lighting an output charge, which fires a blade, severing the line, constricting the skirt
01:51of the parachute, allowing the parachute to progress to the next stage.
01:54And that's where we get to the big quarters vehicle shape that you're used to.
01:57So this is one of the gores of our main parachute.
02:01We have 80 total gores.
02:03You can see this is not a ribbon parachute.
02:05This does not have all those holes.
02:07So that we can really slow those astronauts down, in this case to about 17 miles per hour.
02:12And we basically pack our parachutes into deployment bags, pack that deployment bag into a mortar,
02:18plug a pyrotechnic charge into the back of the mortar, and off we go.
02:23At that point, we have gone through the most stressing parts of the deployment of the parachutes.
02:29That's when we're all going to breathe a sigh of relief and cheer.
02:31All of these materials here, we have tight controls so that we know exactly the strength of each
02:36piece that goes into this, so that we know that the performance with the astronauts will
02:41be the same as the performance that we've analyzed, that we've seen in our 30 plus drop
02:45tests.
02:46We can test the whole system, top to bottom, pyrotechnics and all, to ensure that every
02:52time we deploy these parachutes, they're going to perform the way we want them to.
02:54We have a lot of the data we need to have to show up here.
02:54Let's see.
02:55.
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