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The New Mars Landing Approach: How We’ll Land Large Payloads on the Red Planet
- Landing a human mission on the Red Planet might be impossible due to the combination of Mars' ultra-thin atmosphere and the ultra-large size of spacecraft needed for human missions.
- Having perfectly landed Mars rover missions, Rob Manning suggested that such a mission might not be possible. But due to 20 years of work and research, the outlook has vastly improved.
- Mars' atmosphere provides challenges not found on Earth or Moon; a large, heavy spacecraft only has a few minutes to slow down from incoming interplanetary speeds to under Mach 1 before transitioning to a lander.
- The Supersonic Transition Problem arises from a velocity-altitude gap below Mach 5 where there is too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on Moon using propulsive technology alone.
- SpaceX's supersonic retropropulsion (SRP) maneuver demonstrated that using the propulsion system and firing engines backward to shed velocity works, which is only one of the leading means of landing heavy equipment, habitats and even humans on Mars.
- The EDL team believes that SRP is the only Mars entry, descent and landing technology that is intrinsically scalable across a wide range and size of missions to shed enough velocity during atmospheric flight to enable safe landings.
- Numerous logistical issues remain unsolved when it comes to landing a human mission on Mars such as how the big spacecraft like the Starship will be steered and flown through Mars' atmosphere.
- Landing a human mission on Mars will take a lot of time, with over 26 months to prepare for each launch window since it is challenging to achieve trial and error results when needed.
- The supersonic retropropulsion question has now been answered, but there are still many unknowns that need addressing.
- Mars presents a new set of challenges, and the team will need to take lessons learned from their successful missions while anticipating new obstacles.
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