Parking

Over the years, NASA has successfully parked several landers on the surface of Mars.  This is no small feat.  The travel distance required for simply reaching the parking lot is about 300 million miles.  The highway has neither a single rest stop nor a single sign of direction posted.  The minimum time required, from Earth launch to Mars landing, is 150 days.  The distance and time traveled may be considerably greater than the minimum, dependent upon launch details and speed of travel.    These details are associated with finding the best parking spot, which may be a wide crater or a frigid plain.   Additionally, there is the tricky part of entering a hostile atmosphere at a speed of several thousand miles per hour and not crash-landing at the end of that.

I find the fact that NASA can accomplish this successful parking maneuver while driving the vehicle from millions of miles away astounding.  I am especially appreciative of the feat every time I drive through a parking lot in Helena, Montana and see dozens of cars taking-up two spaces, the drivers having clearly parked their vehicles sideways across the brightly painted demarcation lines there to neatly land them.  I imagine the drivers of these vehicles exiting their ride and hopping right over the lines on their way to purchase nasal spray or a bag of potato chips.  No rocket science there.

 

--Mitchell Hegman