1/20/2024 0 Comments Mars lunar landing today“We also have to be precise with our landing on Mars - not only to pave the way for future precision landings on the Red Planet for both robotic and human-crewed missions, but also because Mars 2020’s scientifically appealing landing site at Jezero Crater has all sorts of cliffsides, sand dunes, boulders and craters that can adversely affect us during landing.” “When Pete and Al put the lunar module Intrepid down within about 520 feet of Surveyor 3, it gave NASA the confidence to later send Apollo 15 to Hadley Rille, Apollo 16 to go to the Descartes Highlands and Apollo 17 to land at Taurus Littrow,” said McNamee. In the end, they chose for Pete and Al a relatively nondescript crater in the Ocean of Storms because JPL had plunked down a spacecraft there two-and-a-half years earlier. To demonstrate a precision landing, Apollo 12 mission planners could have chosen just about anywhere on the nearside of the Moon by targeting any of literally millions of known geologic features. And while the previous mission, Apollo 11, was a monumental success, it overshot its intended landing site in the Sea of Tranquility by about 4 miles (6 kilometers). NASA needed Apollo 12 to prove a precision landing was possible because future Apollo missions would target locations in the lunar highlands, where mountains, massive craters, boulder fields and rilles could ruin their day if the lunar modules strayed from their prescribed landing path. That’s all part of the Mars 2020 playbook as well.” “They achieved the first precision landing, deployed the most advanced suite of science instruments of the time, and were the first to interact with another spacecraft that put down on another world. “We on the Mars 2020 project feel a special kinship with the crew of Apollo 12,” said John McNamee, Mars 2020 project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA’s 1969 Apollo 12 Moon mission and the upcoming Mars 2020 mission to the Red Planet may be separated by half a century and targets that are 100 million miles apart, but they share several mission goals unique in the annals of space exploration. and Alan Bean became the first humans to reach out and touch a spacecraft that had previously landed on another celestial body. Fifty years ago today, during their second moonwalk, Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr.
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