Landing the car-sized Curiosity rover on Mars was difficult enough, but what about when you want to go bigger? To test landing a larger payload on the Red Planet, NASA yesterday sent a flying saucer-like craft called the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) 180,000 feet into the Earths atmosphere over Hawaii — and then dropped it. Then, the LDSD deployed NASAs largest supersonic parachute yet. The parachute, which measures a giant 36 meters (118 feet) in diameter, was designed to slow down the LDSD enough to make a soft splash landing in the Pacific.
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