by Chris Hwang
To this day, setting foot on Mars remains to be one of mankind’s greatest ambitions. However, landing on the red planet is not easy. In fact, it’s the most difficult planet in our solar system to land on with a success rate of just 40%; lower than on the Moon, Venus, and even Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It’s because of the unique challenges Mars’ atmosphere presents.
Consider the Earth and the Moon…
In order to land on Earth, we must cut through its thick atmosphere. While this creates the challenge of being able to withstand the immense amount friction and heat generated against an incoming spacecraft, we’ve been able to overcome this with heat shields while using the thick atmosphere to our advantage. It’s allowed us to safely land spacecrafts unpowered, without the use of rockets, as parachutes proved to be very effective at slowing them down.
On the other hand, there is no atmosphere on the Moon. This means no drag, heat, or pressure. In turn, spacecrafts landing on the Moon don’t require heat shields or thick layers of protection, making them much lighter. Although the lack of air no longer makes parachutes viable, we’ve been able to safely land on the Moon with the use of rockets.
The Martian Atmosphere…
However, Mars’ atmosphere is neither thick nor non-existent. In fact, its atmospheric volume is 100 times less than that of the Earth. However, it’s still thick enough that it will melt or disintegrate any spacecraft descending without protection from the heat. It’s also too thin for us to solely rely on parachutes as they become 10 times less effective on Mars. All of this means that not one system on its own is good enough to land on Mars. In fact, when landing the Curiosity Rover, it required heat shields, a parachute, 8 separate rockets, radars, and even a sky crane. And the more complicated a procedure or machine is, the more room for error there is.
While the Curiosity Rover safely touched down onto Mars’ surface on August 6th, 2012, this has not been the case for many spacecrafts that have dared to land on Martian soil. However, with each failed attempt, we inch closer toward leaving our first footprint on Mars.
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