The Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent, and Landing System

摘要

On 5 august 2012 (Pacific Daylight Time), the world watched as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) completed an autonomous landing on Mars. The fate of the most ambitious machine humans ever sent to another planet rested on an innovative and autonomous 7 min entry, descent, and landing (EDL) sequence that was nearly a decade in the making. After traveling over 550 million km in eight months, Curiosity landed just 2.4 km from its target, near a mountain within a crater that past missions would have deemed too difficult to even consider. During EDL, the MSL spacecraft autonomously performed six configuration changes, completed 79 pyrotechnic events, and executed approximately 500,000 lines of computer code with almost no margin of error.