Early Monday morning, at 07.31 Central European time (1:31 US Eastern time) a planetary rover will attempt to land safely on Mars.
After completing an eight-month journey from Earth, the U.S. spacecraft will hit the upper Martian atmosphere at a speed of 21,000 kilometres an hour. And in just seven nail-biting minutes it must come to a relatively gentle stop.
It will use a heat shield and a parachute to slow its descent. But for the final few metres, it will rely on a brand new landing system – the hovering “sky crane,” a retro-rocket-equipped backpack that is supposed to gingerly lower the vehicle to the surface using three nylon cables.
If anything goes wrong in this complex, multistage landing, the $2.5-billion mission will end up as smashed bits of space junk on the Red Planet. So scientists at NASA – the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration – have good reason to dread the final moments of the 563-million-kilometre trip to Mars.
Read more: NASA scientists brace for Mars landing's ‘seven minutes of terror’ - The Globe and Mail
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