There was a lot of enthusiasm around Mars reaching Perseverance rover, our latest robotic interplanetary explorer. Wanting to take advantage of this stimulus, NASA JPL released a lot of information to satisfy public curiosity. But making that material widely accessible also meant leaving out a lot of technical information. People who want a little more can go overboard How NASA’s Persecution Continued on Mars: Aerospace Engineer Breaks Down Intriguing Details published by Jalopnik.
NASA JPL public materials explained the mission in general. Even parts with scientific detail were severely limited for a targeted audience of K-12 students. Anyone who wants more details can find them online, but they would quickly find them in highly technical papers written by aerospace engineers and planetary geologists for their peers. There is a gap between these margins, and this writing goes neatly into that gap. Author [Brian Kirby] our assistant aerospace engineer who compiled many technical references in one statement of the entrance, explained at a level that is roughly equivalent to undergraduate mathematics and science courses.
We get more information on why the landing site is both geologically and technically intriguing, necessitating the development of new capture devices that will undoubtedly help future explorers of the both artificial and human. The complex multistage movement from orbit to surface is explained in terms of kinetic energy regulation. Approaching a wide range of problems to a list of numbers will help us understand why, for example, a parachute was necessary but not enough to take a rover all the way to the surface.
Much of this information is known to long-term interested people, but we all had to start somewhere. This is a great ramp for a new generation of space fans, and together we look forward to Perseverance running down the long and exciting to-do list. Including flying a helicopter, packing surface samples of Mars, and seeing if we can extract usable oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.