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4 days ago · A large, heavy spacecraft streaking through Mars's thin, volatile atmosphere only has just a few minutes to slow from incoming interplanetary speeds (for example, the Perseverance rover was ...
- The incredible challenge of landing heavy payloads on Mars
The heaviest mission ever sent to Mars was Curiosity, which...
- The incredible challenge of landing heavy payloads on Mars
- Landing on Mars Is The Worst
- Curiosity Is The Limit
- Going Heavier Doesn't Scale
- More Propulsion, Less Cargo
- Aim For The Ground, Pull Up at The Last Minute
Historically, missions to Mars are launched from Earth during the flight windows that open up every two years or so when Earth and Mars are closer together. ExoMars flew in 2016, InSight in 2018, and the Mars 2020 rover will fly in, well, 2020. The missions follow interplanetary transfer trajectory designed to either get there the fastest, or with ...
Traditionally, missions have started their descent with an aeroshell to remove some of the spacecraft's velocity. The heaviest mission ever sent to Mars was Curiosity, which weighed in at 1 metric tonne, or 2,200 pounds. When it entered the Martian atmosphere, it was going 5.9 kilometers a second, or 22,000 kilometers an hour. Curiosity had the lar...
Want to do the same thing with heavier payloads? I'm sure you're imagining bigger aeroshells, bigger parachutes, bigger skycranes. In theory, the SpaceX Starship will send 100 tonnes of colonists and their stuff to the surface of Mars. Here's the problem. The methods of decelerating in the Martian atmosphere don't scale up very well. First, let's s...
The next idea to scale up a Mars landing is to use more propulsion. In theory, you can just carry more fuel, fire your rockets when you arrive at Mars, and cancel all that velocity. The problem, of course, is that the more mass you have to carry to decelerate, the less mass that you can actually land on the surface of Mars. The SpaceX Starship is e...
Every kilogram of fuel the spacecraft uses to slow its descent to the surface of Mars is a kilogram of cargo that it can't carry to the surface. I'm not sure there's any viable strategy that will easily land heavy payloads on the surface of Mars. Smarter people than me think it's pretty much impossible without using enormous amounts of propellant. ...
Dec 26, 2015 · None of those will work, either on their own or in combination, to land payloads of one metric ton and beyond on Mars. This problem affects not only human missions to the Red Planet, but also ...
Feb 12, 2019 · Resarchers suggest that we will need larger rockets to land heavy payloads on the surface of Mars rather than bigger parachutes. Landing on Mars Updated 2.12.19, 1:13 PM EST by Victor Tangermann
Simply put, landing on Mars is a difficult business, and only 53% of spacecraft sent there since the 1960s have made it to the surface intact.
Back to Mars, with a spacecraft hurtling into its thin atmosphere at more ... I'm not sure there's any viable strategy that will easily land heavy payloads on the surface of Mars. Smarter people ...
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May 30, 2014 · What will it take to land heavier spacecraft on Mars? How will engineers slow large payloads traveling at supersonic speeds in a thin Martian atmosphere? Can this be done? NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility is playing an integral role in potentially answering those questions with the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator mission, or LDSD.
