A+

Today I watched a live streaming webcast of an interesting NASA test project. It's called the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (or LDSD). It's basically testing a new way of slowing down really large payloads to land on Mars. To simulate this, they launched the device (which looks like a large doughnut with a rocket engine sticking out of the middle) to 100,000 feet using a really big balloon. Once it reached altitude after a couple of hours, the device was supposed to drop off the balloon, light the engine, accelerate to Mach 4, inflate to make a bigger heat shield and deploy an immense 110-foot diameter parachute. Everything went pretty much according to plan except the parachute didn't unfurl completely.

What I found most interesting about the test, though, was something one of the commentators said afterwards. He said that in a test like this, a complete success is considered an "A", but a problem like the one they had with the parachute was an "A+", because it gave them a chance to learn something new. I'll definitely be using this example with my future classes.