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Now that the @NASAPersevere Mars rover is safely on it's way it's time to tell the tale of how NASA's engineers confounded a cocky space reporter with an off-planet landing scheme that fooled a lot of people, although thankfully no one in charge of the mission. 1/
In August 2012 I headed to JPL in Pasadena for the @MarsCuriosity rover landing. But, being a little too smug, I'd already written most of the article I was expecting to publish. It was going to crash - it had to crash - there was no way this was going to work. 2/
Without human control the probe was going to hit Mars' atmosphere and survive the atmospheric compression with a heat shield. Then it would fire off the world's largest supersonic parachute to slow down further before dumping the shield and 'shute. 3/
Once free of the parachute the one-ton (on Earth) probe, attached to a rocket-powered sled, would break free of its housing and hover over the Martian surface, lowering the rover onto the surface with cables, then detaching to crash as far away as possible. 4/
It sounded like complete bollocks - an idea that computers had modeled but sounded like something Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg would have planned. As such I had my "Curiosity becomes just that - nuke tanks gets spread over Martian surface" story ready to roll. 5/
Spent a great day at JPL waiting for the landing late at night local time. Saw the Voyager gold disc, lots of interesting tech, @wilw was utterly charming, and got my copy ready. One article for success, another for failure. One worrying sign - JPL was still using Windows XP 6/
NASA engineers refer to the landing as Seven Minutes of Terror. There's almost nothing they can do at this point - given the time lag they had to trust that the systems they'd slaved over for the last few years would work. 7/
When the first images came back I stood up and applauded, something I've only done twice in the last dozen year and a big journalistic no-no. We're trained to be impartial observers, not cheerleaders - something that seems to have been forgotten these days. It was worth it. 8/
At 2am, after the last press conference, I headed back to my Pasadena motel with a couple of French space journos. We drank Scotch and wine outside our rooms and mused over the day's events. None of us thought this would work, but all were glad that it had. 9/
Now China's #Tianwen-1 will use the same system to land its probe, as will Perseverance's landing.
The moral of the story: Seemingly dumb ideas work when you have engineers to work, test, work and test again. A lesson learned from that great day. 10/
The moral of the story: Seemingly dumb ideas work when you have engineers to work, test, work and test again. A lesson learned from that great day. 10/
