That's pretty genius.
For years, NASA has employed tons of mechanisms, from giant airbags and parachutes to jetpacks, to get its rovers to land softly on the surface of Mars.
Now, the agency is planning to test out an entirely new approach, which involves intentionally crashing its spacecraft into the Martian surface but protecting it with a "crumple zone" — the same basic principle that keeps car passengers safe during a collision.
To test out the new approach, NASA dropped electronics at more than 100 miles per hour from a tower and into a full-sized mockup of SHIELD's attenuator, an inverted pyramid made up of metal rings."The only hardware that was damaged were some plastic components we weren’t worried about," SHIELD’s project manager Lou Giersch said in the post.
"We think we could go to more treacherous areas, where we wouldn’t want to risk trying to place a billion-dollar rover with our current landing systems," Giersch said. "Maybe we could even land several of these at different difficult-to-access locations to build a network.""If we can do a hard landing on Mars," SHIELD team member Velibor Ćormarković added, "we know SHIELD could work on planets or moons with denser atmospheres.
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