Scientificamerican.com reports that a commercial effort to get humans into orbit around planet Mars in the late 2020s now includes a sleek vehicle to send astronauts down to the surface of the Red Planet.
The aerospace company Lockheed Martin late Thursday (Sept. 28) unveiled new details for its Mars Base Camp plan, an architecture aimed at building a crewed space station in orbit around the Red Planet that would support long-term exploration at Mars by astronautson 1,000-day missions. Among the updates unveiled was a tantalizing design for a reusable, single-stage surface lander called the Mars Ascent/Descent Vehicle (MADV).
The MADV would attach to the space station, and travel to and from the Martian surface via supersonic retropropulsion, which uses rocket engines to slow the lander from supersonic speeds during its descent, according to three Lockheed Martin engineers who discussed the lander in a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia. Supersonic retropropulsion is the same approach utilized by SpaceX in to land its reusable Falcon 9 rocket boosters.
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Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: NASA/JPL/Corby Waste License: CC-BY-SA
Source: scientificamerican.com
