NASA announced that the Orion spacecraft successfully completed the first flight-test of its parachute system on Wednesday.

A test version of the Orion spacecraft landed safely in an Arizona desert this week. The spacecraft was pulled by a C-17 aircraft and carried 35,000 feet above the Yuma Proving Ground of the U.S. Army. This was the first time a parachute's system was tested at this altitude. Engineers also tested how the system would behave if they induced a 10-second free fall, which accelerated the system's speed and increased its aerodynamic pressure.

After the spacecraft's free fall, Orion's forward bay cover parachutes deployed. This was a critical move, since the forward bay cover was also designed to be a protective structure that needed to stay with the spacecraft as it re-entered Earth. The parachutes that delivered the craft to a safe landing were found under the cover. It is important that during the re-entry, the forward bay cover deploys first so that the supporting parachute can also be released.

"We've put the parachutes through their paces in ground and airdrop testing in just about every conceivable way before we begin sending them into space on Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 before the year's done," said Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer in a NASA news release. "The series of tests has proven the system and will help ensure crew and mission safety for our astronauts in the future."

As part of the tests, the engineers also directed one of the main parachutes to skip the second part of a three-phase unfurling process called reefing. They tested whether one of the main parachutes would fully open after the first step, without an intermediary phase. This test proved that the spacecraft's parachute could still work despite unforeseen failures.