Monday, July 25, 2011
Mars Curiosity rover landing animation
Above is an 11 minute NASA animation of the Curiosity rover mission. Of particular interest is the landing sequence which involves a parachute descent which eventually releases a little booster that hovers over the surface and deploys the rover Curiosity by lowering it with a cable.
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4 comments:
You can tell from the beginning that that's a U.S. .GOV funded mission from all that wasted and redundant landing sequence.
Wasting fuel while hovering and lowering the rover with all that extra weight for winches and cables....
What's wrong with the balloons they used before?
Oh, yeah- it didn't add Billions in cost over-runs for someones brother-in-law.
It does sort of seem like a landing system Rube Goldberg would have designed.
This rover is too heavy to use the balloon landing system. But who knows, I am sure you could get it there using duct tape, string and dime-store balloons. If only you worked for NASA. What a shame. I can only hope you use level the same criticism where it belongs such as the non-competitive contracts awarded to KBR for the wars.
Did NASA really make this video? Someone should point out that there is no air in space; hence, no sound effects are required. George Lucas must have produced it for them....whatever
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