



Sources: NASA, USA Today, CNN

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RE: Just further proof...
By FaaR on 8/6/2012 2:10:05 PM , Rating: 3
What a ridiculous post! There's so much wrong with everything, from your painfully flawed grasp of facts, to your inability to apply logical thinking and everything inbetween. You could scarcely have gotten anything more wrong had you actually tried.

This mission was a lot more difficult to achieve compared to those in the past due to the size of the rover the United States landed. Previous rovers have landed on the surface using shock-absorbing airbags, but those weighed less than 200kg. The Curiosity is a 1-tonne plus vehicle.

And the landing process is no different than the Apollo landing either, you're correct there Sir. No different, since Neill and Buzz landed on the moon first by aerobreaking through the moon's atmosphere whilst guidance thrusters kept them on course, then fired a supersonic parachute to reduce speed further, then released from the chute and free-fell for a second before switching to landing thrusters to bring speed down further and then gently being winched down the last ten-fifteen meters or so to the lunar surface.

Yes, that was exactly how Apollo 11 landed. Trust me, I know these things just as well as you do!

RE: Just further proof...
By hduser on 8/6/2012 2:18:17 PM , Rating: 3
You forgot the part where on Mars, everything is done remotely and autonomously. It'd already landed before we knew about it. Apollo moon landing was done in real time.

RE: Just further proof...
By delphinus100 on 8/6/2012 9:04:28 PM , Rating: 2
Well, about 1.5 seconds behind events.

And that might not have worked, left to itself. As Neil noted later, they were coming to 'a football field sized crater full of boulders,' for which he had to extend the approach and land beyond, getting very close to their fuel limits...

The Curiosity landing would have been somewhat less tense, if a pilot could have been present (or if FTL direct control were possible...)

RE: Just further proof...
By Fritzr on 8/8/2012 1:57:53 AM , Rating: 2
Now don't give him too much credit ... He had a good 10 seconds of flight time left in the tanks when he touched down at the alternate site he chose just before he would have smashed the lander on the planned site.

The Mars lander did not have the luxury of a last second change in plans since it would have been a pile of junk long before mission control discovered a mistake in landing sites.

The sky crane gently setting the rover down on whatever was there made sure that it would survive almost any type of terrain.

Good advance planning meant that many complex systems failed to succumb to Murphy and there appears to be nothing stopping the rover from driving away once all the post landing checklists are completed and operators have had a chance to look at the pictures of the landing site returned by rover.

