Landing Sequence of the Curiosity Mars Rover: Step-by-Step !

In order to land the Mars rover, NASA developed a new, never before used technology known as the Sky Crane. It is worth remembering here that the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech is Dr. Charles Elaachi [Lebanese]. He oversees the space exploration program such as the Mars Rovers.

Elaachi’s careful management of the Rover program, wrote the US News and World Report, was a key piece of its success. And Elaachi gives equal credit to some extraordinary luck.

Curiosity Mars Rover	NASA
Launch	11/26/2011
Landing on Mars	08/06/2012
Expected Length of the Mission	> 686 Days
Main Objective	To determine whether Mars was ever habitable

Details of Landing:

Description	Time until Landing, Seconds	Speed of the module, m/sec
Cruise Stage Separation	1016 sec.
Cruise Balance devices separation	896 sec.
Entry into the atmosphere	416 sec.	5900 m/s
Peak Heating
Peak Deceleration
Hypersonic aero-maneuvering
Parachute Deploy	162 sec.	405 m/s
Heat Shield separation	138 sec.	125 m/s
Radar Data Collection
Back Shell Separation
Powered Descent	80 sec.	52 m/s
Engaging of the Sky crane, separation of the rover from the sky crane	16 sec.	0.75 m/s
Start of descent
Landing	0 sec.	0.75 m/s
Crane Flyway
Done !! :)

While people of earth, especially our area, are so busy [fighting, killing, raping ...] each other, Elaachi and his team decided to salute them from Mars !

Peace.