How to Touch Down on Mars | StarTalk

All right, so let's back up for a minute, because your specialty was getting the thing there safely. Yes, so that the scientists could do their job. And so, would I remember from Spirit and Opportunity? They preview that the previous round of this, they had like airbags. Now, so the thing comes down, and airbags deploy, and it bounces until it stops.

Now you have Curiosity, because those were the size of like microwave ovens, let's say. Yes, okay, so Curiosity is the size of a car. Yeah, and why not use airbags? Oh, there are no fibers known to humankind from which we can make a fabric, from which you can make a bag that could handle the loads of that car-like rover hitting the surface of Mars.

Okay, so now actually do you use what I'm told is called a sky crane? Yes, this sounds complicated. What is that? It's like a jetpack. It's like a jetpack. The rover was sort of wearing a jetpack, and then about 25 meters from the surface of Mars, the jetpack lowers the rover below it, and then to descend until the rover's okay.

I think we have a long video of this. Can you be like Bill? Yes, I drew you got the video. Let's check it out. Okay, take the talk us through it.

All right, so we hit the atmosphere going quite quickly, about 13,000 miles an hour. That's fast enough to burn up or melt the whole spacecraft. That would be uncool, so we wrap it in a special shell. We actually steer our way through the atmosphere. This is the first for this expedition, and that's where you see those rockets going off. We're actually maneuvering in the atmosphere.

And then, when we've slowed down to about, oh, a little less than a thousand miles, now we open up a parachute, in our case, the world's largest supersonic parachute. We opened about Mach 2. We get rid of the heat shield that protected us from atmospheric entry, and then we let go, and we go on to rockets.

Now you can see a rover with its wheels. There's six wheels. They're all sort of tucked up, and it's got this jet backpack on top of it. It's slowly descending into the Gale Crater. We're looking at the ground with the radar, and then here we do the SkyCrane maneuver. We lower the rover below us, drop the wheels down, both vehicles continue to descend until Mars takes up the weight of the rover.

We sense that, cut ourselves free, and fly off to a safe distance. Easy peasy, right?