[X] My Assistant

[Jim from NSF.com]

Saw the MSL video, which was similar to the MER video. It was awesome. Will try to get a copy

[djellison]

If you describe to yourself the process of the MPF and MER landings, and then do the same for the MSL landing...neither is particularly confidence inspiriing.

The thing to remember is that there is only one team of working age in the world that has landed on Mars, and it's done it three times. If they think that the MSL system is the way forward, to be brutally honest there isn't really anyone out there to challenge that imho.

" The long descent with retro rockets will be treacherous and unpredictable."

Well - that's no different to Viking (worked twice) - and indeed given that it's from only 900m altitiude, the MSL decent stage will be working for a shorter period of time than that for Viking probably. We did that 25 years ago.... to call it treacherous and unpredictable today is not true.

There was no full scale testing for Pathfinder, Viking, MER...you just can not test that sort of stuff on Earth - there's no way to replicate the conditions. You can test systems, you can simulate based on those systems - but you just have to build enough smarts and flexibility into the system to mitigate the risk.

And as someone else has mentioned - the bags just don't 'do' bigger....and as it is they take up a HUGE ammount of the payload. For a delivered rover of 180kg, you have 827kg hitting the top of the atmosphere. Scale it all up - a 500kg rover - we're talkig 2300 kg at the top of the atmosphere. The bags are good up to a certain point - but beyond that, they just don't make any more sense.

Doug