"We have an even better idea of where the rover is than we do of its orientation. Al Chen—who led the Entery, Descent, and Landing team—said the rover touched down about 1.7km from the center of its intended landing area. He noted that Perseverance landed in what he called "a fairly rugged area." Showing the image below, he said that the blue areas were considered acceptable for landing, yellow is iffy, and red presented areas where there was at least a 4 percent chance of dropping the rover onto something unfortunate."
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
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The lander uses Hydrazine which is extremely toxic and its NASA we are talking about here... they need to throw all their money into the ballooning budget of the James Webb telescope . I'm sure they did many tests in vacuum chambers on the thrusters and many of the systems in computer simulations.
Also, if they did do demo landing tests on Earth I'm sure everybody would be showing those clips before the actual landings instead of computer animations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Simulating the different gravity being the most difficult challenge
Ok, I can accept all that, but you two are missing the key point - imagine how cool it would look to see the landing process from a camera in a drone capturing the entire thing!
Ok, I can accept all that, but you two are missing the key point - imagine how cool it would look to see the landing process from a camera in a drone capturing the entire thing!
Agreed. When tuning in yesterday for some reason I had it in my head that they would have some orbiting camera and some type of land-based camera that caught the landing. But that would be insane. Stupid Hollywood, making me want unrealistic things.
I am looking forward to the footage from the mounted cameras though.
Straight up, though, it's disappointing mars is so lame. Would be way cooler if there were weird alien trees, and 5D animals, and hot alien chicks or something. Just basically looks like Airdrie instead.
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