--- title: 7 Minutes of Terror Over Mars: The Curiosity Rover | TIME description: NASA will Face seven minutes of terror over Mars when the robot rover Curiosity arrives at the red planet canonical: https://time.com/video/KBIgtGHi/ og:title: 7 Minutes of Terror Over Mars: The Curiosity Rover og:description: NASA will Face seven minutes of terror over Mars when the robot rover Curiosity arrives at the red planet og:url: https://time.com/video/KBIgtGHi/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/KBIgtGHi/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 7 Minutes of Terror Over Mars: The Curiosity Rover twitter:description: NASA will Face seven minutes of terror over Mars when the robot rover Curiosity arrives at the red planet twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/KBIgtGHi/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 7 Minutes of Terror Over Mars: The Curiosity Rover > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 7 Minutes of Terror Over Mars: The Curiosity Rover [Watch (HLS stream): 7 Minutes of Terror Over Mars: The Curiosity Rover](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/KBIgtGHi.m3u8) (5:07)  _Published 2012-06-23. NASA will Face seven minutes of terror over Mars when the robot rover Curiosity arrives at the red planet_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:25 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [NASA's Perseverance Rover Successfully Lands on Mars](/video/vfU7oIIi/) ### NASA's Perseverance Rover Successfully Lands on Mars [Mars Curiosity Rover: How We'll Know It's Safe](/video/7gFtn04y/) ### Mars Curiosity Rover: How We'll Know It's Safe [Curiosity Rover Blasts Off to Mars](/video/ayE139XX/) ### Curiosity Rover Blasts Off to Mars --- ## Transcript When people look at it it looks crazy. It's a very natural thing. Sometimes when we look at it, it looks crazy. It is the result of reasoned engineering thought but, it still looks crazy. To the top of the atmosphere, down to the surface. It takes just seven minutes. It takes 14 minutes or so for the signal from the spacecraft, to make it to Earth, that's how far Mars is away from us. So when we first get word that we've touched the top of the atmosphere. The vehicle has been alive or dead on the surface for at least seven days. Landing also known as EDL to refer to as a Seven Minutes of Terror. Because we've got literally seven minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars, going from 13000 miles an hour to zero in perfect sequence, perfect choreography, perfect timing and the computer has to do it all by itself. So with no help from grandma. If any one thing doesn't work just right, it's game over. You slam into the atmosphere and develop so much aerodynamic drag, our heat shield, [ SOUND ] it heats up and glows like the surface 1, 600 degrees. During entry, the vehicle's not only slowing down violently, through the atmosphere, but also we are guiding it like an airplane, to be able to land in a very narrow constrained space. This is one of the biggest challenges that we're facing. And one that we have never attempted on Mars. Mars is actually really hard to slow down, because it has just enough atmosphere that you have to deal with it otherwise, it will destroy your spacecraft. On the other hand, it doesn't have enough atmosphere to finish the job. [ SOUND ] We're still going about 1000 miles an hour, so at that point we use a parachute. The parachute is the largest and strongest supersonic parachute that we've ever built to date. It has to be able to withstand 65, 000 pounds of force. Even though the parachute itself only weights about 100 pounds. Kinda opens up that fast. It's a neck snapping nine joules. At that point, we have to get that heat sheild off. It's like a big land scape blocking our view of the round to the radar. The radar has to take just the right altitude and velocity measurements at just the right time or the rest of the landing sequence won't work. [ SOUND ]. This big, huge parachute that we've got, it'll only slow us down to about 200 miles an hour. And that's not slow enough to land. So, we have no choice but we've got to cut it off. [ SOUND ] And come down in rockets. Once we turn those rocket motors on, if we don't do something, we're just gonna smack right back into the parachute. So, the first thing we do is make it a really radical indevor to fly off into the sun, diverting away from the parachute. Killing at a horizontal velocity giving the rover moving straight up and down, so that it can at the surface of this radar and see right were it is going to land, and going straight down. To the bottom of the crater, right beside a six kilometer high mountain. You can't get those rocket engines too close to the ground, because if we were to descend propulsively, with our engines all the way to the ground, we would essentially create this massive dust cloud. [ MUSIC ] That dust cloud could then go and land on the Rover. It could damage mechanisms. It could damage instruments. So the way that we solved that problem is by using the sky crane [ INAUDIBLE ]. 20 meters above the surface, we have to lower the rover below us on a tether that's 21 feet long. And then gently deposit it on it's wheels, on the surface. I said Rover touches down and he's now on the ground, but the same state is an evolution force with a rover. You must cut the [ UNKNOWN ] immediately and slide to the state to a safe distance from the rover. 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