NASA’s first landing efforts, the Viking 1 and 2 missions of 1976, had to snap images from orbit

This entry was posted in Space Administration on by .

[ How NASA Aims to Achieve Perseverance’s High-Stakes Mars Landing ]

When the robotic exploration of Mars kicked off in the 1970s, the best available pictures of the planet’s surface were so crude that targeting where to go was akin to playing a blindfolded game of darts. NASA’s first landing efforts, the Viking 1 and 2 missions of 1976, had to snap images from orbit before mission planners could pick landing sites, and even then any semblance of safety was far from guaranteed. The vintage tech of the Viking missions could only ensure that each lander would come to rest somewhere within an ellipse 300 kilometers long and 100 kilometers wide, hopefully close to a central point scientists had flagged for investigation. Ultimately, NASA officials put this ‘landing ellipse’ on the safest places they could see from orbit, setting down each Viking in a smooth, near-featureless plain stretching more than a thousand kilometers.


Publisher: Scientific American
Author: Jatan Mehta
Twitter: @sciam
Reference: Visit Source (Read Article)

While you’re here, how about this:

NASA’s Next Mars Rover Is Ready for the Most Precise Landing Yet


Publisher: NASA
Date: 2021-02-15T23:00-05:00
Twitter: @11348282
Reference: Visit Source (Read Article)

NASA’s Perseverance rover to attempt ambitious landing on Mars

Perseverance launched from the Florida coast last July, and after a seven-month journey through the cosmos, is scheduled to touch down on Mars’ Jezero Crater at 3:55 p.m. ET on Thursday.

The rover’s entry, descent and landing on Mars will broadcast live on NASA’s website and YouTube channel, with coverage commencing at 2:15 p.m. ET. Special Spanish language programming — a first from NASA for a planetary landing — will begin at 2:30 p.m. ET.

Publisher: abcnews.go.com
Reference: Visit Source (Read Article)

NASA rover Perseverance on track for daredevil landing on Mars

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance, the most advanced robotic astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, neared the end of its seven-month, 293-million-mile (470-million-km) journey on Wednesday, hours away from a daredevil landing attempt on the Red Planet.

With 370,000 miles (596,000 km) left to travel, Perseverance was hurtling through space on track for a bull’s-eye touchdown on Thursday inside a vast basin called Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed and river delta, mission managers said on Tuesday.

Larger and more sophisticated than any of the four mobile science vehicles NASA landed on Mars before it, Perseverance is designed to extract rock samples for future analysis back on Earth – the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.


Publisher: U.S.
Date: 2021-02-17T11:02:38Z
Author: Steve Gorman
Twitter: @Reuters
Reference: Visit Source (Read Article)

NASA Mars rover Perseverance landing: How to watch, and why it matters

If all goes well, on Thursday at 3:55 pm ET, the planet Mars will have a new robot resident. That’s when NASA’s Perseverance rover is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet, after its seven-month journey through space. You can watch NASA’s live broadcast of the landing below (starting at 2:15 pm ET).

Prepare to see some very tense-looking engineers around 3:48 pm. That’s when Perseverance enters its ‘seven minutes of terror’ landing sequence. Because it takes several minutes for any communication from Mars to reach Earth, NASA’s team cannot pilot the rover’s landing. So Perseverance has to land itself, without any guidance from humans.

logo
Publisher: Vox
Date: 2021-02-17T12:10:00-05:00
Author: Brian Resnick
Twitter: @voxdotcom
Reference: Visit Source (Read Article)

Happening on Twitter

Video

Greetings Earthlings: There is no spoon or AI. The data presented above may one day be zapped to another dimension. Just thought you should be aware. Guess what. I dropped it.