Six Minutes of Terror - Landing Humans on Mars

OriginalArlen writes "Universe Today has a fascinating article discussing the difficulty of executing EDL (entry, descent, landing) on Mars for vehicles bigger than MER, Viking and Pathfinder, and the challenges for manned craft in particular. Airbags can't be used for obvious reasons, but the atmosphere is too thin to be used for parachutes or aerobraking by large heavy vehicles. The stronger gravity (compared to the moon) makes an Apollo-style powered descent impossible. The best current idea is a huge inflatable torus called a hypercone: 'Imagine a huge donut with a skin across its surface that girdles the vehicle and inflates very quickly with gas rockets (like air bags) to create a conical shape. This would inflate about 10 kilometers above the ground while the vehicle is traveling at Mach 4 or 5, after peak heating. The Hypercone would act as an aerodynamic anchor to slow the vehicle to Mach 1.'"

Comments

Don't land everything at once

[boristdog]

How about a bunch of smaller craft, each landing on its own?

Send a bunch of supply craft and break the human landings up into one or two people at a time in smaller capsules.

As long as everything lands in the same area, (supplies first, humans last) then you just need to gather it together for your mars base.

Probably cheaper to launch several smaller craft anyway, and you could have plenty of supply redundancy.