

How the Curiosity rover will land on Mars from a sky crane - dctoedt
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20013105-239.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheSpaceShot

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fondue
Why use a sky crane when they've already proven they can get a great landing
from one of those bouncing-ball type things? It seems like they decided to
introduce additional points of failure for neat-o-ness.

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fondue
Read further and answered my own questions ...

"Airbags were never an option for MSL, which is the size of a car and weighs
1,950 pounds, almost five times as much as Spirit and Opportunity (also known
as the Mars Exploration Rovers). Airbags cannot be scaled up enough to support
MSL and still fit inside the launcher. And previous airbag-equipped landers
made unsteered, ballistic entries, resulting in a relatively large landing
zone "footprint," or error ellipse, limiting the number of possible landing
sites."

