Real Martians Moment: Orion's Thermal Protection System

Jeremy Vander Kam works as the Orion Thermal Protection System (TPS) manager at NASA's Ames Research Center. Orion's TPS or heat shield is the largest ablative heat shield ever made and is vital technology to helping astronauts safely return to Earth after a Mars mission. At Ames, lots of Arc Jet testing is conducted with very small samples of the ablative material to evaluate how they’ll do on reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. The Orion TPS group is excited about playing such a huge role in this next giant leap NASA is taking by sending humans to Mars and, most importantly safely returning them home.