Mars Rover Landing's "Seven Minutes of Terror" Just Got Scarier
Glitchy orbiter may leave NASA in the dark for nail-biting Mars touchdown.
Those seven minutes are the time it should take the vehicle to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the surface, braking all the way.
"We go from 13,000 miles [21,000 kilometers] per hour to zero is seven minutes," Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said at a press conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
(Watch a National Geographic video: "Mars Rover's 'Seven Minutes of Terror.'")
It's by no means assured that the rover will make it down intact—some 60 percent of all Mars missions have failed.
"Landing on Mars is always risky," McCuistion said, noting that there are hundreds of automated steps that must all occur in the proper sequence.
"If one of them is
