Apr 12, 2014 10:53 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

At this point, human travel to Mars is inevitable, so NASA is planning to test an early prototype of a flying saucer that will one day be able to transfer heavy loads to the Red Planet.

According to New Scientist, NASA is planning to test its disc-shaped spacecraft in Hawaii this June. Dubbed the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD), the saucer will lift itself into the stratosphere from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on the island of Kauai.

For previous landings on Mars, NASA has used parachutes and rockets as well as tethers for the 2012 mission of putting the Curiosity rover on the Red Planet. The LDSD would ideally be able to carry extremely heavy loads and slow down whatever machinery is entering Mars' thin atmosphere.

"It may seem obvious, but the difference between landing and crashing is stopping," Allen Chen, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists who oversaw the Curiosity landing, told New Scientist. "We really only have two options for stopping at Mars: rockets and aerodynamic drag."

The saucer will fly up to about 55 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, roughly halfway to space, and then a test vehicle will be detached. The inflatable saucer will fire like a parachute and should help the test vehicle land softly on the water.

NASA is planning three more similar tests like this one to simulate the thin atmosphere on Mars, which can cause an object to fall toward the surface at supersonic speeds. NASA would love to eventually send astronauts to explore Mars, but LDSD could also land rovers and other robotic machines closer to their scientific target.

Curiosity was places in the Gale Crater with a destination of Mount Sharp in its sights. However, the mountain was so far from the landing site that Curiosity is still trekking toward its ultimate destination two years later. Being closer to its ultimate destination would cut down on the tire wear and tear and some of the system glitches Curiosity has experienced.

"Personally, I think it's a game-changer. You could take a mass to the surface equal to something like 1 to 10 Curiosities," Robert Braun, of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told New Scientist. "Think about it like a bridge for humans to Mars. This is the next step in a sequence of technologies that would need to be developed."

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