Whats so special about landing on mars?

I thought we did that like 4 times already....

Time to reproduce. I want my grand kids to enjoy some nice tanning in Mars

#4 - I really wish something like this would happen. It would shake up the entire world and be SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!

@Raccoon: Mars mission initial success rate just ended up at 40% (16/40) after this, so still a minority. And also it had been several years since we last put anything there, and the last 3 (I think) successes had been preceded by several embarrassing failures in a row.

However, what was actually special now was how it was done. So far, when humans put something on Mars, it was through a hard landing: Inflate a huge air cushion around the lander or rover, have it smash into the ground and bounce to a stop. But with Curiosity being WAY bigger than anything put there before, this was no longer possible... So they had it scan the ground during descent and aim itself at the right spot, slow itself down with the biggest parachute ever used, release itself from the carrier spacecraft, slow itself down further by firing rockets (eight of them, perfectly in unison), lower itself by cables from the rocket stage / skycrane when close to the ground, cut off the cables on touchdown and then send the rocket stage / skycrane away so it won't fall on it... And do all of this on its own, because it'd take 7 minutes from atmospheric entry to touchdown and the signal would take 14 minutes to get here, so a minimum of 28 minutes for 2-way communication which could send it any commands from the nearest human.

So THAT's what was so special about it :)

@Cavalary: Thx for the info

Oh and i was the guy who asked what's so special about landing on mars :)

rofl i suck at replying to messages

anyways thx

#5 Marvin The Martian