How is Curiosity looking for signs of life? When they received confirmation that Curiosity was safe, engineers pumped fists and jumped up and down in jubilation. NASA personnel tensely watched the rover's descent on live television. Falling at 1.5 mph (2.4 kph), MSL gently touched the ground in Gale Crater about the same moment the sky crane severed the link and flew away, crashing into the surface. The landing assembly dangled the rover below the rockets using a 20-foot (6 m) tether. ![]() To solve the problem, engineers designed the assembly to cut off the parachute, and use rockets for the final part of the landing sequence.Ībout 60 feet (18 m) above the surface, MSL's "sky crane" deployed. The parachute could only slow MSL to 200 mph (322 kph), far too fast for landing. Under the parachute, MSL let go of the bottom of its heat shield so that it could get a radar fix on the surface and figure out its altitude. (29,480 kg) to break the spacecraft's fall to the surface. NASA officials said the parachute would need to withstand 65,000 lbs. Instead, the rover went through an extremely complicated sequence of maneuvers to land.įrom a fiery entry into the atmosphere, a supersonic parachute needed to deploy to slow the spacecraft. 6, 2012, after a daring landing sequence that NASA dubbed " Seven Minutes of Terror." Because of Curiosity's weight, NASA determined that the past method of using a rolling method with land bags would probably not work. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) (opens in new tab) Infographic detailing the landing sequence for the Curiosity rover.
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