April 22, 2009--Seconds after being launched from a mortar, a 51-foot-wide (16-meter-wide) test parachute strains against 80-mile-an-hour (130-kilometer-an-hour) gusts inside the world's largest wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center.

The largest ever designed for extraterrestrial use, the parachute is to slow the fall of the car-size Mars Science Laboratory rover after the mission launches in 2011. The rover's goal: to determine whether there is--or ever was--life on Mars.