"How Will NASA Land Big Payloads on Mars? ..." Topic

…Inflatable Donuts.

"Even with some mishaps, humans have successfully landed robotic spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Any landing tries to do two things. First, you want the spacecraft to decrease in speed before coming in contact with the surface (high speed contact would be called a crash). Second, you want your system to be low mass. You don't want to bring a giant rocket to Mars just for the landing—that means you have to expend even more energy getting it to Mars in the first place.

To consistently accomplish these things, NASA is building what it's calling a low-density supersonic decelerator. Now let me ask and answer the questions you might have about LDSD…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Well, it is Donut Day!

Maybe I will get my flying car now.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

I had a friend who worked on those things for JPL before the big budget crunch and layoffs. He went from a world renowned engineer to a cutting torch operator at the San Francisco shipyards cutting up naval vessels for scrap.
The last time anybody saw him, he picked up his gear and stepped off the ship he was working on into the bay.

Wow, that is a sad fate.

Very sorry to hear that.

Sounds very representative of our whole manned space program though as well, which has suffered a similar fate.

I suspect we'll need to figure out how to get people back up into orbit again, before we can even think of anything like Mars.