The giant canopy that helped land Perseverance on Mars was tested here on Earth at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Test. Test again. Test again.

Testing spacecraft components prior to flight is vital for a successful mission.

Rarely do you get a do-over with a spacecraft after it launches, especially those bound for another planet. You need to do everything possible to get it right the first time.

Three successful sounding rocket missions from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in 2017 and 2018 to test a supersonic parachute proved their worth with the successful landing of the Perseverance mission on the Red Planet.

After traveling 293 million miles (472 million kilometers), the supersonic parachutes, designed to slow the rover’s descent to the planet’s surface, successfully deployed and inflated. They made the smooth touchdown of Perseverance possible.This mission required us to design and build a 72-foot parachute that could survive inflating in a Mach 2 wind in about half a second. This is an extraordinary engineering challenge, but one that was absolutely necessary for the mission,” said Ian Clark, the test’s technical lead from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “To ensure they worked at Mars under those harsh conditions, we had to test our parachute designs here at Earth first. Replicating the Martian environment meant that we needed to get our payload halfway to the edge of space and go twice the speed of sound. Sounding rockets were critical to our testing and ultimately our landing on Mars.”