Mars ‘Sky Crane’ Revisited? Rover Prototype Drops To Ground Safely In European Tests

(Before It's News)

How do you land a machine on the Red Planet? Appears that the answer keeps changing as engineers get smarter about solving the problem.

Over the years, NASA has experimented with approaches ranging from soft landings to inflatable airbags to the famous “Sky Crane” that landed Curiosity on Mars in 2012. And in this video above, you can see the European Space Agency taking the sky crane idea a little further in prototype testing.

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© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2014. |
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