USA: "The inexperienced on the road believes it's insane. Even the group that's operating [on] it - sometimes we think it's insane."
Adam Steltzner is accountable for getting Nasa's $2.5bn Fascination rover objective to the top area of the Red World on Thursday 6 Aug.
This cellular Mars Technological innovation Clinical (MSL) should carry about a trend in our knowing of the geological history of the planet… offered it can area securely.
Steltzner and his group have developed a spectacular strategy to the issue that includes a rocket-powered motorised hoist.
"It's so serious, it's so bold, it's so alternative. It doesn't encounter like there's a lot of protection," he informs the BBC's Skyline program.
"You can't say, 'Oh, I'm doing what they did before and, oh, it just didn't perform out; I didn't get lucky'.
"No, we're not doing what we did before. We're doing something absolutely novel, clinging it way out there. You encounter revealed."
But although Steltzner confesses to the odd time of anxiety in the nighttime, he and his group actually have great assurance they can take this one off.
"Reasoned technological innovation believed," he says, will get them through the white-knuckle journey that is access, nice and getting - or EDL.
This is how the dilemma will start up.
The 900kg rover will strategy Mars encased in a safety pills - the greatest pills Their astronauts has ever used, larger even than the Apollo Management Component.
It will arrive at the top of the weather visiting 20,000km/h.
All that power has got to be thrown out. When the rover's tires get in touch with the earth six-to-eight moments later, they must be going no more than about 1m/s.
What frightens the inexperienced most perhaps is the complexness of it all.
It begins with very accurate routing through area.
If the rover has any possibility of attaining its tropical focus on of Gale Crater, it must first hit an "entry keyhole" in the sky just a km or so across.
As the pills thunders downwards, it ejects ballast prevents to shift its center of severity and factor its position of assault.
This will provide automobile raise. And with the aid of thrusters and some dead-reckoning, the access pills will fly a direction through the higher environment.
The bottom of the pills will get hot as it rubs up against the Martian air - the warm protect will encounter conditions above 2,000C.
More ballast prevents are then thrown to straighten up the automobile before, at 11km elevation and with the nice speed now decreased to 1,400km/h, the pills deploys a supersonic parachute.
This tremendous cover will start instantly and must process an wish of almost 30 lots.
Half a instant later, what is perhaps the most essential occasion happens - the separating of the warm protect.
Unless it comes off, Curiosity's nice mouth cannot see the earth.
"The mouth is essential," says He Wallace, the journey program administrator on the venture.
"You have to area gently or else you'll crack the rover. To area gently, you have to know how great you are, obviously, from the earth. But furthermore you have to know how quick you are going - both top to bottom and flat in a trench.
"It's a pulsed-Doppler program and has the advantage of being incredibly accurate in both velocimetry and altimetry, and it's very difficult to deceive."
The parachute will further slowly the drop to about 450km/h, and it's at that factor, at an elevation of about 8km, that we see the so-called "crazy" things.
A "sky crane" positioning the rover falls away from the parachute, using thruster rockets to further slowly its nice as it leads down towards the top area.
At just 20m above the earth, the sky motorised hoist moves and decreases the rover down to the top area on three plastic cables.
Once the tires get in touch with, the cables are cut, and the motorised hoist goes away to collision at a secure range. Steltzner and his team can take in again.
All of this is automated; it's all pre-programmed. World and Mars are so far apart (250 thousand km) that marketing and sales communications hyperlinks withstand a 14-minute wait. Mission Management cannot intercede as if this were some on the internet video.
My preferred variety in this dilemma problems the quality of pyrotechnic gadgets.
These start key activities, such as the cutting of the plastic bridles or the starting of the chute real estate.
All must strike - and in series - to create sure achievements. The variety is 76.
But if all of this does audio a bit insane, there is objective.
We've understood most of all there is to know about the easy geological history of Mars.
To expand our knowing needs getting more innovative instrumentation to harder-to-reach locations.
That indicates a larger rover and a more solid getting program that can put down on the common sixpence.
Consider all the top area tasks Their astronauts has sent to the Red World, from the Vikings in the Seventies to the Arizona sensor / probe in 2008.
Each has had a more accurate getting program than its forerunner, but only with Curiosity's EDL technology could you with certainty create an effort to get within Gale Crater, one of the inner gaps on Mars.
"Scientists want to go to somewhere difficult because that's where the stones are revealed. The technical engineers in previous times desired to go somewhere smooth where their devices would be maintained," describes Prof Sanjeev Gupta, a UK specialist on the Fascination science group.
"But we've now shifted on to the next level. Problems with lifestyle and habitability are really kept in the stone history, and to see those stones you need to go to canyons and hills - to get the chronology, to see the connections and comprehend previous environment changes.
"You won't get that on smooth flatlands."
Engineers determine an ellipse in which they can with certainty land Viking's ellipse was 300km across - broader than Gale Crater itself Even Arizona (100km by 20km) could not with certainty fit in Gale
Curiosity's getting program allows it to focus on the crater floor .
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