NASA is looking for "kind of a drag" technology by inviting college students around the world to contribute to future Mars missions by coming up with ideas for safely landing heavy payloads on the red planet.

The challenge, the space agency says, is to slow a significantly heavy vehicle as it plummets through the thin Martian atmosphere on its way to a safe landing on the planet's surface.

NASA wants to give college and university students a crack at the problem through its Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge.

Agency researchers hope students can come with concepts for generating the drag needed to slow heavy scientific payloads utilizing inflatable heat shields or hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (HIAD) devices.

"NASA is currently developing and flight testing HIADs – a new class of relatively lightweight deployable aeroshells that could safely deliver more than 22 tons to the surface of Mars," says Steve Gaddis, manager of NASA's Game Challenging Development Program (GCD) at the agency's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. "A crewed spacecraft landing on Mars would weigh between 15 and 30 tons."

The heftiest payload NASA has ever successfully brought to rest on the surface of Mars is the Mars Curiosity Rover, and it weighed in at just one ton.

It is hoped large aeroshells can generate sufficient aerodynamic drag to decelerate and safely deliver much larger payloads, NASA says, and since such devices can also generate lift, they could allow for the design of alternate kinds of missions.

In the BIG challenge, interested teams of between three and five students, undergraduate or graduate, can submit a proposal detailing their concepts to the space agency by Nov. 15.

NASA says it is particularly interested in new concepts such as shape-changing or pneumatic actuation capable of dynamically altering the structure of an HIAD inflatable.

"The BIG Idea seeks novel and robust ideas and applications for generating lift using HIAD technology," NASA says on its BIG website.

Winners of the first round of the competition will be invited to submit complete technical papers on their concepts by the spring of 2016.

A panel of NASA scientists at Langley will judge those submissions in April 2016, the space agency says.

Winners of the BIG Idea Challenge will be offered paid internships on the Langley GCD team to help in developing flight tests of their concepts.