Hacker News Reader

Comment by Simulacra | Hacker News Reader

The sky crane maneuver (as JPL called it) was necessary because if they descended propulsively to the surface, it could kick up a huge dust cloud. That dust could land on the rover and damage the instruments. See this awesome video: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1090

View on HN

I was standing next to one of the engineers who wrote the software for the landing while we were watching on the big screen at Twitter. A few moments after it landed he announced that his code worked and was being deleted to make room for surface operations code.

That's one of those cool things that never gets thought about outside the people directly involved. "Why keep the code required for landing readily available permanently, since it'll never ever need it again." That's one of the aspects that I enjoy about programming Arduino devices. I'm so spoiled to essentially unlimited memory on desktop/laptops (in comparison) that writing code to fit into extremely limited finite amounts of memory becomes challenging in a fun way.

I always wonder if there was any video released of the sky crane tests on Earth. I have to imagine they were done at some point, but I never saw it.

I think there was also concern about the hydrazine-fuelled landing rockets contaminating the site and instruments.

Listening for quakes is not an activity which will be impacted by the surface being gunked up.

Plus this awesome video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZX5GRPnd4U

The audacity of that.

I like to think some manager saw the army drop a humvee from a blackhawk and asked "why can't we do this, but on Mars?" and nobody came up with a good enough answer so they did it.

Edit: Why is this comment unacceptable?

I always just figured Wile E. Coyote was on staff at the time and had his ACME catalog handy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com