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A NASA Terrier-Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket launched the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE) from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility inVirginia, on 31 March 2018, at 16:19 UTC (12:19 EDT). ASPIRE was designed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, to test a parachute for possible future missions to Mars. The payload, a bullet-nosed, cylindrical structure holding a supersonic parachute, is expected to reach an altitude of 32 miles approximately two minutes into the flight. The experiment will splash-down in the Atlantic Ocean 40 miles from Wallops Island and will be recovered and returned to Wallops for data retrieval and inspection.