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The first NASA rover, Sojourner (on the Mars Pathfinder lander), and twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, used a combination of parachutes, retrorockets, and airbags for landing. Curiosity, launched in 2011, weighs nearly 900 kg, and was too heavy to be landed this way, as the airbags needed for it would be too heavy to be launched on a rocket. [2]
Curiosity is a car-sized Mars rover exploring Gale crater and Mount Sharp on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. [2] Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral (CCAFS) on November 26, 2011, at 15:02:00 UTC and landed on Aeolis Palus inside Gale crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17:57 UTC.
Each rover used four airbags with six lobes each, all of which were connected. Connection was important, since it helped abate some of the landing forces by keeping the bag system flexible and responsive to ground pressure. The airbags were not attached directly to the rover, but were held to it by ropes crisscrossing the bag structure.
Although some previous missions have used airbags to cushion the shock of landing, the Curiosity rover is too heavy for this to be an option. Instead, Curiosity was set down on the Martian surface using a new high-accuracy entry, descent, and landing (EDL) system that was part of the MSL spacecraft descent stage.
Mars Science Laboratory (and the Curiosity rover) descending on Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) (and Curiosity rover), launched in November 2011, landed in a location that is now called "Bradbury Landing", on Aeolis Palus, between Peace Vallis and Aeolis Mons ("Mount Sharp"), in Gale Crater on Mars on 6 August 2012, 05:17 UTC.
While surveying the site of an ancient channel on Mars, the Curiosity rover ran over a rock and discovered pure sulfur on the red planet for the first time.
Rover Mars 3 28 May 1971 4.5 Not deployed [4] [5] 3. Mars 96: Penetrator Mars 96 16 Nov 1996 88 Failure [11] 4. Deep Space 2: Penetrator Mars Polar Lander 03 Jan 1999 2.4 Failure [14] [15] 5. Sojourner: Rover Mars Pathfinder 04 Dec 1996 11.5 Success [12] [13] 6. Mars helicopter Ingenuity: UAV Helicopter: Mars 2020 Perseverance rover: 30 Jul ...
The following data were compiled for the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity rover) by the Entry, Descent and Landing team at the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It provides a timeline of critical mission events that occurred on the evening of August 5 PDT (early on August 6 EDT). [12]