
SpaceX’s SuperDraco Thruster - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/meet-spacexs-superdraco-thruster-the-key-to-landing-a-dragon-on-mars/
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deftnerd
SpaceX's ambitions to land on Mars are exciting, especially using a thruster
system.

Landing things on Mars is harder than landing on Earth in many ways. The
atmosphere is so thin that you don't lose a lot of energy during atmospheric
entry (which helps since payloads don't need a lot of heat shielding) but it
also means that parachutes don't slow you down nearly enough.

That's why the Pathfinder had to land using a complicated airbag system. Even
using parachutes and rocket braking, it impacted the surface at over 50mph.

If SpaceX succeeds with their thruster landing system, payloads will be
significantly easier to put on the ground and won't have to be engineered to
withstand such extreme forces.

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scigeek42
Wouldn't it be awesome if future Mars science missions had a nice, constant
landing platform they could design around? Like a new rover or stationary
science base would just be "one Dragon unit of cargo".

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TrainedMonkey
Here is the hover test using 8 SuperDraco thrusters:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Pm8ZY0XJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Pm8ZY0XJI)

Entire burn is about 4 seconds.

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hoorayimhelping
Video of 8 SuperDracos performing a pad abort test a year ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8)

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scigeek42
Ars has really been getting into the whole Red Dragon mission this past week.
I am very hopeful this is a sign of things to come. Namely a greater media
focus on advances in space exploration, which hopefully leads to a greater
"buy-in" from the public.

