Twelve years earlier, NASA landed its six-wheeled science laboratory utilizing a bold brand-new innovation that reduces the rover utilizing a robotic jetpack.
NASA's Curiosity rover objective is commemorating a lots years on the Red Planet, where the six-wheeled researcher continues to make huge discoveries as it inches up the foothills of a Martian mountain. Simply landing effectively on Mars is an accomplishment, however the Curiosity objective went a number of actions even more on Aug. 5, 2012, touching down with a strong brand-new method: the sky crane maneuver.
A stroking robotic jetpack provided Curiosity to its landing location and reduced it to the surface area with nylon ropes, then cut the ropes and flew off to carry out a regulated crash landing securely out of variety of the rover.
Naturally, all of this ran out view for Curiosity's engineering group, which beinged in objective control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, waiting on 7 painful minutes before emerging in pleasure when they got the signal that the rover landed effectively.
The sky crane maneuver was born of requirement: Curiosity was too huge and heavy to land as its predecessors had actually– enclosed in air bags that bounced throughout the Martian surface area. The method likewise included more accuracy, resulting in a smaller sized landing ellipse.
Throughout the February 2021 landing of Perseverance, NASA's most recent Mars rover, the sky crane innovation was a lot more exact: The addition of something called surface relative navigation allowed the SUV-size rover to touch down securely in an ancient lake bed filled with rocks and craters.
Enjoy as NASA's Perseverance rover arrive on Mars in 2021 with the exact same sky crane maneuver Curiosity utilized in 2012.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
JPL has actually been associated with NASA's Mars landings considering that 1976, when the laboratory dealt with the firm's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, on the 2 fixed Viking landers, which touched down utilizing pricey, throttled descent engines.
For the 1997 landing of the Mars Pathfinder objective, JPL proposed something brand-new: As the lander hung from a parachute, a cluster of huge air bags would pump up around it. 3 retrorockets midway in between the air bags and the parachute would bring the spacecraft to a stop above the surface area, and the airbag-encased spacecraft would drop approximately 66 feet (20 meters) down to Mars, bouncing many times– often as high as 50 feet (15 meters)– before coming to rest.
It worked so well that NASA utilized the exact same method to land the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004. That time, there were just a couple of areas on Mars where engineers felt positive the spacecraft would not come across a landscape function that might pierce the air bags or send out the package rolling frantically downhill.
“We hardly discovered 3 put on Mars that we might securely think about,” stated JPL's Al Chen, who had vital functions on the entry, descent, and landing groups for both Curiosity and Perseverance.
