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Posted: |
Oct 11, 2016 - 8:40 AM
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By: |
Solium
(Member)
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Ready for descent — deploy thrusters! The Schiaparelli spacecraft, part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars mission to Mars, has received its landing commands for its expected Oct. 19 touchdown on the Red Planet, and a new video shows how the spacecraft will descend.
Launched on March 14, the ExoMars mission rocketed two connected spacecraft, the Trace Gas Orbiter and its Schiaparelli lander, toward Mars. The two spacecraft are expected to separate on Sunday (Oct. 16), and if all goes according to plan, the Schiaparelli lander will descend on the Martian surface three days later. While the Schiaparelli lander is on the Martian surface, the Trace Gas Orbiter will orbit the Red Planet and study its atmosphere.
Source:
http://www.space.com/34341-european-spacecraft-mars-landing-next-week.html
Note:
The United States is the only country (to my knowledge) who have successfully landed a working probe or rover on Mars out of dozens of tries since the early 70's.
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Shame about the lander, i was following the updates, but at least everything else seems to have gone well.
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Posted: |
Oct 19, 2016 - 12:55 PM
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By: |
Grecchus
(Member)
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I missed it too, Sol. They used the same sort of method to deploy the lander that was used to land Curiosity. In this case there were three sets of rocket engines in clusters of three per set equally spaced around the circumference of the lander, whereas, I think the Curiosity thrust vector system used a more stable set of four rocket streams pointing downwards, and it was lowered from that novel designed crane mechanism, which winched it down to the surface with the softest of bumps. ExoMars sort of wobbled down to a height of two metres, whereupon the rocket engines controlling it's descent cut off, and it dropped to the surface under Martian gravity. If, during the descent after separation from the drag chute the wobble increased to an ever increasing oscillation, or one of the three rocket engine clusters malfunctioned, the lander might have lost control of it's descent. Don't forget, the Martian atmosphere is very, very thin. They designed it to absorb the impact with the planet surface from the 2m hover - but who knows, maybe something broke?
Why couldn't they have used a set of twangy, long, spring-like legs to absorb the force of impact so the risk of any breakage is much reduced? A bit like a spider or crane fly.
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