Landings are another planets are a messy operation that can be hazardous to anything nearby, but they can also be dangerous to the landers themselves. Engine plumes can blast dust, grit, and boulders back up toward the spaceship, putting the engines, science payloads, and even crew and jeopardy. For example, during Curiosity Rover's Mars landing in 2012, NASA has discovered that one of the Rover's wind sensors was damaged during the descent. While the exact cause is unclear, the team believes that stones and other debris from the Martian surface may have been tossed up during the landing, damaging the Rover's wiring. So, the damage left the Rover with only one working wind sensor. Space dust is also notorious to lunar landers because it could clog engines and instruments or damage them. We've gotten away with it thus far because most unmanned probes and the Apollo lunar landers are light enough that their engine plumes aren't too bad. However, if we want to expand our presence on the moon, we'll need rockets that are much much bigger. The proposed Artemis landers will be double to quadruple the mass of Apollo and modeling predicts that one of the Mike displays up to 470 tons of lunar dirt upon landing. In all of the renderings of lunar landings that we've seen so far, the landers themselves have touched down on the lunar surface directly, without a landing pad. It's probably possible to do so with massive landers if you're picky about where you land and equip your vehicle with adequate shielding to resist everything it throws at it. Any lunar program would be limited if it couldn't find the correct landing spot to avoid these impacts and build adequate shielding to protect the lander. Also, shielding adds a large amount of heft to the payload and you're out of luck if there's no safe landing location near where you want your moon base to be. The traditional approach to build a landing pad is to send smaller landers initially, then build a pad out of local materials. This approach could work, but it would add months or years to your entire mission, and it is estimated that each dedicated lunar pad building or preparation logistics trip would cost more than $120 million. So, how can we address this issue? NASA's innovative advanced concepts program is sponsoring a novel technique to make planetary landings for huge spacecraft safer. Mast and space systems is working on a proposal for instant landing pads in which a spaceship constructs its own landing platform as it approaches the planet. This strategy would be safer, cheaper, and allow us to establish a base on the moon as fast and efficiently as possible by not requiring the construction of landing pads in advance. The system that mast and is developing is called fast or in flight alumina spray technique. Here's how it would work. A few hundred meters above the surface of the moon or Mars or anywhere a mission wants to land, the lander comes to a hover. Aluminum pellets are then fed into the engine exhaust nozzle where they get partially melted in the engine plume and blast it down onto the surface. Most planetary surfaces that a spacecraft would be landing on are cold enough that the alumina cools and hardens on contact and over the course of about 15 seconds, something like 300 kilograms of alumina gets layered into a totally functional landing pad. This approach can significantly reduce deep cratering and prevent regular objective from impacting the surrounding environment. That means spacecraft can safely land anywhere on the moon or Mars without the need for a precursor pad construction mission. For years, mast and has been testing rockets on Earth. Its fleet of terrestrial test vehicles has accumulated more than 600 rocket-powered landings. Following the NASA innovative advanced concepts phase 1 award in June 2020, mast and has spent the last year studying and advancing the fast concept in collaboration with Honeybee Robotics, Texas A&M University and the University of Central Florida. In September, the company announced that they had wrapped up the initial research, proving their technology is feasible in the lunar environment. According to Mastin, the analysis determined the fast concept is feasible for building near instant landing pads during a lunar descent, even when utilizing an Artemis scale human lander. They added that the exact landing pad thickness and material properties will be based on the size and temperature of the engine plume and can be optimized to meet a diverse set of missions. For example, a large-scale Artemis human landing system would take 10 seconds to release 186 kilograms of alumina at up to 30 meters above the lunar surface, creating a 6 meter diameter landing pad. The pad would then require 2.5 seconds to cool before the vehicle touches down for a safe landing. In the next phase of NASA innovative advanced concepts, mast and plans to mature the landing pad technology further by testing it in a lunar environment. In short, by mitigating plume effects on the moon, Mars, and beyond, instant landing pads can keep astronauts, infrastructure, and spacecraft safer while increasing the number of potential landing locations. As NASA continues to support these efforts, the technology might someday get to see the light of day in a different world. So, what do you think will be the future of this technology? Let us know in the comments, and don't forget to subscribe to this channel for more space-related content. And as always, thanks for watching!