NASA has announced its intentions to develop a new kind of Mars lander that can survive a crash landing rather than using the more sophisticated approaches used to date. They believe this should offer considerable savings for making future probes and landers to alien worlds.
So far, NASA has landed on Mars nine times without any problems using various methods, including cutting-edge parachutes, giant airbags, and jetpacks to land safely.
Now, engineers are trying to find out if crashing is the best way to land on Mars. This new crashable lander, Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device, or SHIELD for short, would use an accordion-like, collapsible base that acts like a car's crumple zone absorbs the energy of a hard impact instead of slowing down a spacecraft's fast descent.
The new design could make it much cheaper to land on Mars by making the scary entry, descent, and landing process more accessible and giving people more options for where to land.
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