![]() ![]() Thus, the landing system the JPL team has in mind is a potential game changer in two ways. The new precision EDL system will add the use of images in the final stages of descent to guide a future Mars lander to within perhaps a hundred meters (about 300 feet) of a target site, which is a level of precision no previous lander has achieved. NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover, slated for a 2011 launch, will steer using a small amount of lift to compensate for the atmospheric density uncertainty, guiding its trajectory through the atmosphere and reducing its landing uncertainty to an area roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide. Just before landing, the rovers used an imaging system to determine whether a last-minute thruster firing was required to reduce their horizontal velocity at touchdown, in order to avoid ripping open the airbags that cushioned their arrival. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers flew unguided entries, spinning like a rifle bullet for stability, with landing uncertainties mostly due to the density of the top of the Martian atmosphere, which can vary daily. The new precision EDL system uses images of the planet’s surface taken during descent to navigate precisely to a desired target on the ground. Such a system has the potential to open up vast areas of the planets that have previously been off limits to exploration. Now a team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing an Entry, Descent and Landing, or EDL, system which could allow safe landings much closer to targets of scientific interest than previously possible. Similar concerns guided the selection of landing sites for the Apollo missions to the moon.Ī pinpoint landing system would allow robotic probes to land safely at or very near hard-to-reach science targets on planetary surfaces, such as the one pictured above. ![]() The landing sites for all of NASA’s Mars landers have, to this point, been mainly wide, flat plains chosen to maximize science return while minimizing the risk posed by hazards on the planet’s surface. But putting serendipity aside, the rover’s projected landing area was an ellipse about 85 kilometers (53 miles) long and 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) wide within a fairly benign landscape. The Mars Exploration Rover team scored an unexpected interplanetary hole-in-one in 2004, when the airbag encased Opportunity rover came to rest inside a crater containing exposed bedrock. ![]()
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