NASA’s Perseverance rover is landing on Mars Today (up: landed within target zone)
- Thread starter Forerunner
- Start date
- Tech/Gadgets
im a stupid baby i realize the Herculean effort, but what's dif between this rover and the last one?
Mars doesn't have enough atmosphere for a pure parachute landing. Its also too big to drive off a lander.
Friendly reminder that there's a good chance this same technology will be used to land humans on the planet.
You dont want to be blasting the surface with rockets you are about to land on (including the rover)
The impact on the rover is too great for the sensitive instruments on board.
The rockets on a conventional lander can kick up dust, particles or create craters which would compromise the rover. With sky crane, there will not be those external factors that would effect it
Y'all, what we need is send a bunch of satellites with camera to orbit Mars before the next landing mission. Then we can hopefully use those orbiting satellites to record real footage of future probe landing. We need multiple cameras for multi-angle that can be used for editing later into Hollywood blockbusters.
Putting a landing system on the rover would make the rover a LOT bigger, and end up having to haul all that useless weight around as they roll around Mars.
And they can't do the airbag method of the old rovers because it's just way too big.
At most they might be able to have it land as a platform and have the rover roll off, kind of like the old rovers. But there's probably tech reasons why that's nto feasible either.
Still blows my mind that we humans can send something through space and pinpoint a landing in the vastness of space while everything is in motion. I know it's all math, but still
It's because of the sensitivity of the instruments. Sending in an entire lander would kick up a ton of dust and probably wreck the rover.
First image
This one will be part of a 3 phase mission to bring samples back to earth.
