by Tiffany Kelly
Pasadena Sun
Landing the rover Curiosity on Mars Aug. 5 will be a nerve-racking process with no room for error, say Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers.
In a video released Friday, engineers describe the descent on the Red Planet in detail. The process demands 76 pyrotechnic devices, six vehicle configurations and 500,00 lines of code.
“When people look at it, it looks crazy,” JPL engineer Adam Steltzner says in the video. Once Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) touches the top of Mars’ atmosphere, it has to survive scorching temperatures (1600 degrees) and an atmosphere 100 times thinner than the surface of Earth.
