Space Flight
Space
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The Hardest Two Feet in Space Flight
Mars has a very thin atmosphere about one hundredth of that on Earth. And you arrive with enough speed, enough kinetic energy that the energy of motion could melt or vaporize the entire spacecraft. So we need to manage that. We put the spacecraft in a special aeroshell which will smolder and not burn. That process takes us down to about a thousand miles an hour or so. Still not slow enough to land on the surface of Mars. But then there's a last bit of air velocity and you take out with a landing system.
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