Another Mars landing on Sunday

[mmcirvin]

Preparations for the Phoenix lander, to come down near the edge of the north polar cap.

Phoenix is the one that is a combination of elements from two missions that didn't make it, the crashed Mars Polar Lander and the canceled Mars Surveyor 2001 lander (Phoenix's frame actually is the body of the Mars Surveyor 2001 lander, pulled out of storage and refitted). In its landing technique, Phoenix is like Mars Polar Lander or the 1970s Viking landers; it's going to attempt a classical soft landing on legs with retrorockets, rather than the radical bouncy-airbag-polyhedron technique that worked so well for Mars Pathfinder and the two rovers. Here's hoping this mode works better for Phoenix than it did for MPL. If all goes well, it will dig through the soil to sample the ice that should lie just beneath the surface.

Comments

[adw3345.livejournal.com]

it will dig through the soil to sample the ice that should lie just beneath the surface

Well, it WILL, one way or the other if you think about it.

-Derrick

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Deep Space 2 tried to burrow through the soil and sample the ice - it was a pair of bullet shaped probes that were designed to just land hard, not bounce - and start transmitting - but they didn't work.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

From my layman's point of view, the bouncy-airbag-polyhedron seems like a no-brainer as opposed to retros and struts, not that I don't trust engineers, but it seems a lot easier for us to make things crash into Mars than otherwise. Is there any definite benefit to still designing Mars craft that actually land?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the main problem with the airbag approach is just that there's a limit to how big a thing you can practically land that way. Also it's probably harder on the machinery, though I imagine anything you want to get down there in one piece has to be pretty tough.

(Also, I forgot to mention that one airbag lander actually failed, namely Beagle 2. But Beagle 2 had a lot of problems as a project; the postmortem basically concluded that the budget was too low to really do it right.)