So let me get you right, you're arguing that the way they just managed to land Curiosity on Mars was practically impossible and a fucking stupid way of going about it.mistermack wrote:Yes, of course the lower gravity helps.Xamonas Chegwé wrote: Fortunately, the small size and mass of Mars (compared to the Earth) more than offsets the sparse atmosphere when it comes to making the landing possible. The surface gravity is just over 1/3 of Earth's, so things weigh 1/3 as much. On an Earth sized planet with a similarly rarified atmosphere, it would be dead metal, not to mention deeply buried, by now.
But it definitely doesn't more than offset the sparse atmosphere. It helps, but that's all.
It's much easier to land heavy loads on Earth, even with our much stronger gravity.
The Lunar missions splashed down six tons of landing craft just using parachutes, with humans inside.
That's because the parachutes are so effective in our thick atmosphere.
That could never happen on Mars, even if you added air bags.
If they couldn't land an unmanned vehicle weighing one ton safely with a parachute, six tons would be just completely impossible.
The other problem with the thin atmosphere of Mars is that most of the retardation is needed because of the speed of travel of the mission, not the pull of gravity. If the craft is initially doing more than 10,000 mph relative to Mars, all of that horizontal speed needs to be scrubbed off before the craft can begin to drop verically by parachute.
The high atmosphere of Mars is so thin that it wouldn't be able to scrub all of that speed off just with the heatshield, the parachute would have to do a lot of the work.
Sounds legit.
