Landing on Mars: seven minutes of TERROR!

JPL's video demonstrating the engineering challenges in the precise timing of the descent of a human-crewed Mars lander is nail-biting territory. There's a reason they call the landing "seven minutes of terror."

Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Engineering • happy mutants • Mars • Space • thrills • videos • youtube

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The Snowden Principle

http://www.facebook.com/people/Justin-Forposting/100002531076048 Justin Forposting

I have an odd memory of Gary Sinise talking me through something like this.
Handletag

Human-crewed!?
- franko
  
  “human-crude”, maybe?
andre paris

whatever the outcome, landing or not, we’ve come a long way in robotic and ai sciences and it’s only going to get better
JayeRandom

No, that’s incorrect. It’s a actually a small Rhesus monkey at the controls of the Skycrane. He gets a banana if he successfully drops off the rover. He then has about 20 seconds to enjoy it.
http://mooseyard.com/Jens Jens Alfke

It’s not at all human-crewed. This is about the Curiosity rover that’s scheduled to land on Mars this August.

I can’t figure out whether there’s something very different about the requirements for landing Curiosity, or if this is the same technique they already used successfully for Spirit and Opportunity and they’re just being all dramatic about it.
- Nathaniel
  
  Spirit and Opportunity were surrounded by airbags and bounced to a stop (!) – the skycrane has never been tried before.
- http://www.facebook.com/aguite Aric Guité
  
  This is an entirely new technique – Spirit and Opportunity used the airbag protected landing craft technique (basically turning the landing craft into a giant bouncy ball). I’d attach a video, but I can’t find a single one that doesn’t have absolutely terrible background music.
  - Boundegar
    
    Here’s what I don’t get. Since the superball landing was totally successful… we should abandon it and go with a new technology? And it’s called “Seven Minutes of Terror?” I thought we were at war with terror?
    - jandrese
      
      Because the MSL is about the size and weight of a Mini Cooper. Far too big for the airbag technique, even in Mars gravity. Plus, the airbag technique requires some luck as well so that your first bounce isn’t on top of some jagged rock that pierces the balloon and destroys the rover. If the skycrane works, it will be a less random alternative.
      - http://daniel.friesen.name/ Daniel Friesen
        
        I believe they also have to land it in a much more precise location.
      - http://www.facebook.com/brianrazencain Brian Cain
        
        Yes, it’s all about weight and the sky-crane giving it the ability to land in more interesting places with precision.
        
        Check out this pic to compare the size between Curiosity and our earlier Rovers.
      - Petzl
        
        Also, which is more boss? SkyCrane™ or beachball?
    - CognitiveDissident
      
      Although the the bouncy-ball technique may not be sufficient, I believe that the whoopee-cushion technology shows great promise and may propel space exploration to new lows. New lows = successful landings!
      (Just drop it first, and land on it! No uncomfortable bouncing, the kinetic energy is converted into sound!)
      - Anne Noise
        
        And for years our children’s children spoke of the Great Martian Fart.
- Guysmiley
  
  It’s a different technique because the “bouncing ball of doom” landing technique can’t handle the mass of the Curiosity rover. Spirit and Opportunity were about the size of a golf cart and weighed 185 kg, Curiosity is the size of car and weighs 900 kg.
  - http://twitter.com/DavyInFrance Davy Jones
    
    And not forgetting that having a nuclear reactor bouncing on the ground is not going to be something that they would like to test back here on earth..
Nathaniel

It’s a great video but it’s not about a human-crewed lander – it’s about the unmanned Curiosity lander that’s on its way to Mars right now. The landing will take place in August.
z7q2

The engineers talking is interesting, but I rather like this video better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw
- Petzl
  
  Awesome video. We could have easily sent one of these for every space shuttle launch that went up (they each cost $0.5B). But unmanned isn’t teh sexy.
http://twitter.com/obein Henning Buddєивaʊm

With all these pounds, miles, and feet, how is a civilised person supposed to understand this?
- malindrome
  
  You misspelled “civilized”.
- timquinn
  
  Yeah, I guess that whole “metric” thing was sort of a bust, eh?
- CognitiveDissident
  
  It depends on which neighbourhood of the planet that you live in.
  I was all for metric in America, then some moron started to make it confusing with conversion factors, etc, then they dropped the metric, so now gasoline is STILL “metered” out in gallons.
  They should have put plastic representations of a liter and a gallon on top of the pumps, instead of “scaring” people with math!
  Sorry for the rant, but I can’t believe the USA has not fully adopted metric system by now!
  How the heck am I supposed to know how many cups are in a gallon?! But I know that there are 1000 milliliters in a liter EASY!
  How many feet in a mile, five thousand two hundred and who gives a F vs. 1000 meters in a kilometer.
  (But what do I know, I drive on the Parkway and park in the Driveway, and I have Impending-Dark-Ages issues…)
  - sean
    
    Ah, you’re just jealous because our mile is longer than your kilometer and our gallon is bigger than your liter.
  - timquinn
    
    When would you need to know how many cups in a gallon? Never. If you use a system it is easy, if you don’t use it it may not be.
    
    Gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups
- Sanjaya Kumar
  
  I believe the actual calculations are all done in metric. But then they have to resort to “Imperial” to explain it to the taxpayers.
Editz

They need to run things like this during the Superbowl or in movie theaters to help recruit kids into engineering.

Also, though they mention dust fouling as the reason behind creating the sky crane, but was it more a function of budget limitations? We put Viking down using fully powered descent, and the mass difference is around 300 kg.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Es-See/100003058581326 Es See
  
  They really should bring back the newsreel approach to movie theaters. Thats a brilliant idea. Although like you said switch from targeting adults to targeting kids. Flash a bunch of inspiring and positive world-changing snippets in front of tomorrows generations, not more of the mindless buzz of trailers! Lets be realistic, its not like anyone is benefiting from those, oh unless you count Hollywood and we all know how much of a positive impact on the world cinema is making these days. LOL Unfortunately I am a cinephile and will continue to watch the industry perish.
http://twitter.com/impureacts Jason Mitchell

I think they missed a great opportunity for a call back. The final moment of the film should have had the parachute slowly drape over the rover … and cue Thomas Newman.
http://goodsharer.com/ Aloisius

They say this thing is about the size and weight of a Mini Cooper. Personally, I think JPL should give up on this whole space thing and go into the delivery business.

I’d pay extra to have a Mini Cooper delivered via ICBM to my house and then deposited via skycrane.
- http://www.edmstudio.com futnuh
  
  On a similar note, and after having stayed up for a particularly unimpressive Perseid meteor shower, I emailed NASA asking them to forget the ISS and send up a payload-bay full of gravel on the next shuttle mission.
http://www.pattayamail.com John Thomas

Cory, where did you read that this was “human crewed”?
- http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan
  
  Maybe he misheard Hoo, man! Crude.
http://profiles.google.com/kenc3dan Ken Colangelo

Wow, that’s an incredibly nervy thing to try. If this works I will be shocked – totally psyched, but shocked. Just to bow to mindless superstition for a second…Mars has a way of eating probes for breakfast, so many have failed. If it works, this is the ultimate “up yours” to nonsense and magical thinking. Can’t wait! Watch the countdown to landing here.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
greebo

The Mars missions that were lost in the 90′s were nearly all due to software errors. Links to a talk on these, along with the mishap investigation reports here:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/presentations/BugsInTheSpaceProgram.html
Guy Dawson

At 4:15 they say “at 20m above the surface … a tether 21ft long’. 20 meters & 21 feet? I hope those are the correct units!
- http://profile.yahoo.com/BOV56XV5A5ZYIAPB3PZHMCZBHY steve
  
  JPL engineer, “hey did you read Guy’s comment on BB?
  Other JPL engineer, ” shit, stop the countdown”
- airshowfan
  
  I think the skycrane comes to a hover at 20m/66ft off the ground. Then it extends the cables lowering the rover by 6m/20ft. Then the skycrane descends 14m/46ft until the rover settles down onto its wheels (at which point the skycrane is 6m/20ft off the ground). Then separation.
  
  I wonder whether they’ll attempt to land the skycrane or just let it crash once it gets far enough away. Minimizing the impact velocity woul be more expensive (requiring more fuel, more computing resources, maybe an extra sensor or two, etc) but it might be safer for the rover (since there won’t be pieces of skycrane flying everywhere) if they auto-land the skycrane instead of letting it fall and slam into the ground.
  - Culturedropout
    
    Personally, I kind of feel bad for the sky crane. All that way to get to Mars, only to face plant at high velocity, and that’s only if it does its job perfectly. Sort of reminds me of some of my previous jobs, come to think of it. :-(
    - Petzl
      
      Sky crane: DONT CRY BABY. KNEW THIS WAS ONE WAY TICKET BUT YOU KNOW I HAD TO COME.
p96

Stupid fake shaky-cam – it hides any visual indication of how much they expect the craft to pitch, or not pitch, as the rockets are doing the atmospheric correction.

If there were humans aboard, they could get out the $500k space-feather duster and clean off any instruments / solar panels – no need for a sky-crane.
fight4paece

Schrodinger’s Mars Rover for 7 minutes. This is gonna be interesting.
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  I believe it does broadcast simple messages during the aerobraking and landing phase so that if it goes badly, the investigation has a head start. But the transmission will of course be unreliable when there is a lot of plasma around the aeroshell.
sean

Why don’t they just wrap the thing in bubble-wrap, if they’re worried about busting it?
sean

If Mars is like a million and one miles away, they should just put in enough fuel to go a million and NINE TENTHS of a mile. Then it would run out of gas and sputter to a stop and they could swing down on ropes.
Don’t thank me, I saw that in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
omems

That’s an excellently-made video. But I wonder, shouldn’t they have let Dr. McKay engineer it, not Dr. Beckett?
technogeekagain

Rube Goldberg Meets The Martians, again. Given the constraints, it’s a brilliant solution, but…

An essay-in-song on the 1997 misison profile can be found at http://www.oocities.org/area51/vault/8789/bounce.htm (I couldn’t find a current copy, alas; one author’s website is outdated and the other’s has gone AWOL.)
franko

i really feel they over-sell this. it’s awesome all on its own — it doesn’t need the bruckheimer treatment.
- Petzl
  
  The full link previously cited is full of awesomeness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw
SpaceBeers

God I really hope this works.
ImmutableMichael

Be careful. Europe will have a run on the metre and there’ll be a metric crisis, you mark my words.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Then Angela Merkel will tell Greece that they can’t receive a bail-out unless they reduce their meters to 94 centimeters.
http://twitter.com/pishabh pishabh

Anyone else need to change their underwear after watching this?
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_SCMKRY6GRWHQLNKTT7MRAGE6ZY TR

Two things strike me:
1) This landing involves so many physical configuration changes that have to go *just right*. The System Engineer in me is kinda appalled that they’re taking on the risk. Granted, everything always has to go just right when you’re landing on a planet, but I’ve never seen so many Big Things Popping Off And New Things Deploying in my life. Methinks these folks watched too many Transformers movies. Take the last Tricky Maneuver, for example – having the rocket thingie hover overhead as the rover itself is extended down to the ground. They’re doing this because they don’t want to kick up dust that’ll coat the instruments. OK fine, but this is Mars, and Mars has nasty weather– won’t there be a dust storm in the next two weeks anyway? And don’t the instruments have
retractable covers?

2) One wonders if anybody there noticed the irony of bragging about “500,000 L1nes of Cod3… zero margin of error”
- http://daniel.friesen.name/ Daniel Friesen
  
  Undoubtedly the l33t speek and bragging was put in by some PR bozo with no real connection to the engineering team.