Mars Rover Has Landed After 'Seven Minutes of Terror'

NASA's Curiosity Rover has successfully landed on the surface of Mars in a daring maneuver that involved a rocket-powered sky crane lowering the rover to the surface. The Curiosity Rover is expected to spend the next two years exploring the Gale crater on Mars and searching for evidence that the region is now, or was once, habitable for primitive microbial life. In this video, watch what the Mars Rover had to achieve before landing.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] when people look at it uh it looks crazy that's a very natural thing sometimes when we look at it it looks crazy it is the result of reasoned engineering thought but it still looks crazy from the top of the atmosphere

00:00:30 down to the surface it takes a seven minutes it takes 14 minutes or so for the signal from the spacecraft to make it to Earth that's how far Mars is away from us so when we first get word that we've touched the top of the atmosphere the vehicle has been aligned or dead on the surface for at least 7

00:01:01 [Music] minutes entry descent Landing also known as edl is referred to as a seven minutes of Terror because we've got literally 7 minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars going from 13,000 mph to zero in perfect sequence perfect choreography perfect timing and the computer has to do it all by itself with no help in the ground

00:01:31 I if any one thing doesn't work just right it's game over we slam into the atmosphere and develop so much aerodynamic drag our heat shield it heats up and it glows like the surface of the Sun 1600° during entry the vehicle is not only slowing down violently through the atmosphere but also we are guiding it like an airplane to be able to land in a

00:01:59 very Arrow from strain space this is one of the biggest challenges that we are facing and one that we have never attempted on Mars Mars is actually really hard to slow down because it has just enough atmosphere that you have to deal with it otherwise it will destroy your spacecraft on the other hand it doesn't have enough atmosphere to finish the

00:02:22 job we're still going about th000 mph so at that point we use a parachute the parachute is the largest and strongest supersonic parachute that we've ever built to date it has to be able to withstand 65,000 lb of force even though the parachute itself only weighs about 100 lb when it opens up that fast it's a next snapping 9

00:02:47 GS at that point we have to get that heat shield off it's like a big lens cap blocking our view of the ground to the radar the radar has to take just the right altitude and velocity measurements at just the right time or or the rest of the landing sequence won't work this big huge parachute that we've got it'll only slow us down to about 200 mph and that's not slow enough to land

00:03:14 so we have no choice but we got to cut it off and then come down in Rockets once we turn those Rocket motors on if we don't do something we're just going to smack right back into the parachute so the first thing we do is make this really radical divert M we fly off to the side diverting away from the parachute killing our horizontal

00:03:35 velocity and our Vertical Velocity getting the Rover moving straight up and down so it can look at the surface with its radar and see where we're going to land and we head straight down to the bottom of a crater right beside a 6 km high mountain we can't get those rocket engines too close to the ground because if we were to descend propulsively

00:04:00 with our engines all the way to the ground we would essentially create this massive dust cloud that dust cloud could then go and land on the Rover it could damage mechanisms and it could damage instruments so the way we solve that problem is by using the sky cran maneuver 20 m above the surface we have to lower the Rover below us on a tether that's 21 ft long and then gently

00:04:22 deposit it on its Wheels on the surface as the Rover touches down and is now on the ground The Descent stage is in a collision course with a r we must cut the bridal immediately and fly The Descent stage to a safe distance from the [Music] world