The Martian Mach 16 Jacket isn’t just made out of the single most high performance material in our solar system – it’s quite possibly the single most important material in human history so far.
 
It started life as a hypersonic deep space parachute designed to land a multi-billion dollar mission a billion miles away on Titan – a place NASA thinks might be a likely future home. In 2005, after a 2.5 hour descent, it landed the first probe in the outer solar system, which is the furthest any human spacecraft had ever landed – dropping the Cassini-Huygens probe on a moon shrouded in methane monsoons, and covered in cryovolcanoes spewing out jets of −179°C hydrocarbon rain.
 
Over a decade later, it was brought out of retirement to land the Perseverance Rover on Mars – the other place where humans are trying to get a foot on the property ladder. This time it was given just over a second to slow the Rover down to from 20,000kmph to 320kmph, in the middle of a −60°C Martian dust storm. This braking strength is astonishing given the lightness of the material – the 21.5 metre-wide parachute was packed into a nose cone the size of the average backpack.
 
As you’d imagine, a material that can survive methane monsoons, cryogenic cold, Martian dust storms, hydrocarbon rain, cryovolcanoes and hypersonic braking – just to give the world today a window into the worlds of tomorrow – also makes a pretty miraculous jacket here on Earth.