Hank: Only NASA would look at one of these [child's ring-stacking toy] and say, "You know, that looks like a great idea of a heat shield!"

So, spacecraft bound for Mars, or really anywhere with an atmosphere, need something to protect them during entry into the atmosphere. You also *need* the atmosphere as a sort of brake to slow down your spacecraft from its high-speed journey through space. Like, you don't want to use fuel to slow it down. You can use the atmosphere.

But conventional heat shields can only be as big as the rocket that they launch on, which limits the size of the payloads they can protect. So engineers looked at the design of this baby toy and came up with an inflatable stacking-ring design for a heat shield.
It would basically blow up in front of the spacecraft as it lands, kind of like a reverse-Mary Poppins umbrella. This would let them land bigger payloads and use rocket space more efficiently, and NASA is set to start testing this design fairly soon.

You wouldn't normally say that rocket science is child's play, but in this case, it totally is.

[end]