Explanation:
How hard is it to land safely on Mars?
So hard that many
more attempts have failed than succeeded.
The next attempt will be on Thursday.
The main problem is that the
Martian atmosphere is too thick to ignore -- or it will
melt your spacecraft.
On the other hand, the atmosphere is too thin to rely on
parachutes --
or your spacecraft will crash land.
Therefore, as outlined in the
featured video,
the Perseverance lander will lose much of its high speed by deploying a huge parachute,
but then switch to rockets, and finally, assuming everything goes right, culminate
with a hovering
Sky Crane that will slowly lower the
car-sized Perseverance rover to the surface with ropes.
It may sound crazy, but the
Curiosity rover was
placed on Mars using a similar method in 2012.
From atmospheric entry to surface touch-down takes about seven minutes,
all coordinated by an onboard computer because
Mars is too far away for rapid interactive communication.
During this time,
humans on
Earth will
simply wait to hear if the landing was successful.
Last week, UAE's
Hope spacecraft
successfully began orbiting Mars, followed a day later by the
Chinese
Tianwen-1 mission,
which will likely schedule a landing of its own rover sometime in the next few months.
