this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Space, the final frontier
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxeejp0y2pjo
That's super neat. When the floodlights came on I figured it was just doing it for the clarity of the footage before a preset landing sequence started. Have any of the Mars probes had such sophisticated real-time landing systems?
I do think Mars probes also use real time telemetry when landing, but not sure how sophisticated it is.
The Perseverance lander took real time video of the descent to identify interesting places to visit, so I would say it’s fairly sophisticated at this point.
I’m by no means an expert, but my understanding is Mars’ higher gravity than the Moon makes landing like this much harder because you need to bring a much larger lander and much more fuel, etc. And then the thin atmosphere makes normal parachutes not really viable. That’s why NASA has come up with some interesting ways of dropping payloads onto Mars like surrounding one of the rovers in giant balloons.
Here’s a link to the Perseverance’s parachute + sky crane + boosters landing
They're totally different scenarios but I couldn't think of any other successful modern lunar landers which weren't also Chinese. Mars is just the one other thing I know we're flinging lil guys at.
ISRO is building a lunar lander and JAXA the launch vehicle and rover for LUPEX slated for later this decade.