By Nancy Atkinson, UniverseToday, 07.03.12
One of the most technically difficult tasks of any future manned missions to Mars is to get the astronauts safely on the ground. The combination of the high speed needed for a short trip in space and the much lighter Martian atmosphere creates an aerodynamics problem that has been solved only for robotic spacecraft so far. If people will one day walk Mars’ dusty surface, we will need to develop better Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) technologies first.
Those technologies are part of a recent meeting of the Lunar
Planetary Institute (LPI), The Concepts and Approaches for Mars
Exploration conference, held June 12-14 in Houston, which concentrated
on the latest advances in technologies that might solve the EDL problem.
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