Why Can't We Land on Mars?
Written by Fraser Cain
Question: Why can't we land on Mars?
Answer: We get this question quite a bit at Universe Today. When people imagine a spacecraft entering the Martian atmosphere, they think that it's going to be very similar to the Earth. But the reality is that Mars' atmosphere is only 1% as dense as the Earth's atmosphere.
When they're trying to land on a planet, spacecraft use the atmosphere to slow themselves down to a reasonable speed. For example, the space shuttle enters the Earth's atmosphere, and uses it to slow down to the point that it can land like a regular airplane. It's losing thousands of km/h of velocity.
Since the Martian atmosphere is so thin, spacecraft will just smack into the surface of the planet. NASA engineers use a series of techniques to slow a spacecraft down for landing on Mars. Just like Earth, spacecraft heading to Mars will use the atmosphere to slow themselves down a bit. They'll deploy large parachutes to catch as much Martian air as possible.
That's not enough, though, and the spacecraft will then fire their retro-rockets to slow down even more. In some cases, that's enough that the spacecraft can use an airbag system to bounce across the surface of the planet (the Mars rovers did this). In other cases, spacecraft use retro-rockets all the way down until they're safely on the surface (this is what the Phoenix Mars Lander will do).
Landing heavy payloads onto the surface of Mars is actually pretty tricky, and Nancy Atkinson did an incredible article about the challenges of landing large payloads onto Mars.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:39 am
false info!!! We can land on mars if we had the right equipment and tech