Flight Imagery Recorder Locator (FIRLo) and High-Temperature Radome

LDSD (Low Density Supersonic Decelerator) is a Mars EDL (entry, descent, and landing) Technology Development Project that launches three test vehicles out of the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai. On the test vehicle, most mission science data can be recorded safely on land; however, high-speed and high-resolution imagery cannot be telemetered due to bandwidth constraints. Therefore, all information had to be recorded solely onboard the test vehicle; this unit is called the flight imagery recorder (FIR). A typical commercial airliner “black box” is only capable of recording on the order of gigabytes of data, whereas this work required on the order of terabytes (a few orders of magnitude larger).