Why Mars Is The Hardest Planet To Land On



Over the last 50 years, spacecraft have landed on over half a dozen worlds. But nowhere has proven more treacherous than the Red Planet — Mars.

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Following is the transcript of the video:

Landing on Mars is easier said than done. Over the last 50 years, spacecraft have landed on over half a dozen worlds. Including Venus, Saturn’s moon Titan, a comet, and more. But nowhere has proven more treacherous than the Red Planet — Mars. To date, only 40% of attempted landings have been successful. But just looking at it, Mars seems pretty harmless, right? It doesn’t have toxic clouds like Venus. And there’s plenty of flat, stable places to land, unlike a comet. But here’s the thing: It’s not what you can see that’s the problem. It’s what you can’t: The atmosphere.

Mars’ atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Because Mars’ atmosphere is so thin, it makes parachutes less effective. 10 times less effective, in fact. So, let’s say you could skydive on Mars, and you use the same-sized parachute as on Earth. On Earth, skydivers hit the ground running at around 20 mph. But on Mars, you’d be falling at 200 mph on impact. Not good. Now, you could make your parachute larger to slow down more. And that’s partly what NASA does. For example, its Curiosity rover used the largest supersonic parachute at the time, when it landed in 2012.

But even that couldn’t slow Curiosity down, enough. To see why let’s go back to skydiving. If you wanted to slow down to the same landing speed (20 mph) on Mars as on Earth you’d need a parachute that’s 10 times wider. Or about 110 feet in diameter. Wide enough to cover the length of 2.4 school buses. Now, here’s the catch: NASA’s Curiosity rover weighs about 13 times more than the average human. Which means, to slow down to the same speed, it would need an even bigger chute. One that was 400 feet in diameter. But, in reality, Curiosity’s parachute was nowhere near that size. It was only 70 feet in diameter.

Why? Because the bigger the chute gets, the greater the chance it will rip. In fact, the largest parachute ever built and tested was just 150 feet wide. So, in the end, it’s physically impossible to build a parachute big enough. Which makes landing on Mars risky at best. So, how do space agencies do it? Very carefully.

First, the spacecraft deploys its giant parachute to slow down as much as possible  — usually to around 200 mph. Then, it fires retrorockets to take it the rest of the way.

And that might not sound so hard but if the parachute doesn’t deploy at the right time, or the rockets don’t fire at the right height, it’s all over. To date, only three space agencies have ever tried to land on Mars: NASA, the European Space Agency, and the former Soviet Union. None have a perfect record.

So, if landing on Mars is so hard, why do we keep doing it in the first place? Besides the Moon, Mars has more artificial instruments on and around it than anywhere else in the solar system. And you could say that’s because Mars is close by. Or that it might be the best spot to search for signs of alien life. Or could it be that with each successful new landing we come one step closer to the grandest ambition of all: To become the first species ever to inhabit a world beyond our own.

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Why Mars Is The Hardest Planet To Land On

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This Post Has 30 Comments

  1. Rocket Man

    Yeah this is relatable because I need to try A MILLION TIMES to land on duna

  2. Justin Leong

    But mars gravity is 62% lower than earth…. which means you fall down at lower acceleration.

  3. Official-ras

    Question for Ashton Jupiter dosent have a solid surface like other planets and the more the deeper you go more you get stuck and it’s inmpossbil like I’m telling the truth and it’s a gas giant

  4. Hamza B

    Well we just did it / February 19th 2021

  5. Tony Dean

    Eleven successful landings on Mars – 9 of them by the USA.

  6. No

    Ohhhh so thats why i cant land on mars with a parachute in simplerockets2

  7. Shoshanna Cohen

    sounds more like a death sentence going and landing on mars. i like my beautiful green and blue earth.

  8. "To become the first species ever to inhabit a world beyond our own"
    Are you serious??
    This statement alone put me off greatly. It should rather have been " The first species that we know of…"
    This ego-centric attitude is what makes us so self destructive…

  9. Shuryim & aziz

    shouldn't the moon and mercury be harder to land on because there atmospheres are thinner than marses

  10. MissMailer

    Hardest planet? You talked as if the gas giants don't exist.

  11. Nipuna Pamuditha

    Propulsive landings are easier on mars I mean what’s the point of parachute if we are planning to come back

  12. hecker

    Landing on every planet (and moon):

    Mercury: Pretty hard- no atmosphere means no parachutes, also slowing down to orbit Mercury is just pain.
    Venus: Moderately hard- It would be easy if it wasn't for the scorching temperatures.
    Moon: Quite Easy- Though it has no atmosphere, it has pretty low gravity, meaning not much fuel is needed to land.
    Mars: Hard- The thin atmosphere ain't very good at slowing down spacecrafts, meaning you'd need to use both parachutes and engines to slow down.
    Galilean moons: Basically the same as our moon
    Titan: Very easy- Not much reentry heat, low gravity and very dense atmosphere means that you only need a parachute and that's it.

    The rest (except gas giants) are easier than the moon

  13. hecker

    "Mars is the hardest place to land on"

    Mercury: hold my 300+ craters

  14. There are people saying that people are wasting money on Mars when earth is struggling and nasa is wasting money when nasa is helping people all over the world and the US military spends the entire budget of nasa every week

  15. shaquille o'neal

    "Why Mars is the hardest planet to land on"
    It's quite literally the easiest planet to land on

  16. Z

    What abt isro…..??.?.

  17. Brian Roberts

    Interesting. I never thought about the atmosphere being so thin that a parachute would be ineffective.

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