Gadgetory

we're here at national Geographics experience mars event to pop up in new york city that's supposed to simulate what living on Mars might be like and their piece de resistance is 360 landing on Mars experience it combines virtual reality this suspended cable car slash roller coaster type thing to show you what it might be like to enter the Martian atmosphere and then land on its surface alright we're in the control room clearly there's a lot of space in front of me oh it's preparing for it oh there's Mars I see it happening here we go entering that over well yeah entering the atmosphere is not bad fun thinner than Earth's but still poses a problem hopefully our heat shield is holding up now we're going in oh there's the sky it's nice and red not I'm gonna settle oh and we're tilting a lot I don't know how we're gonna land up right NatGeo is fictional ship the Dauntless uses supersonic retropropulsion to land on the Martian surface it's what Elon Musk is proposed for landing on Mars as well it's the idea of using the engines to slow your fall down to the planet's surface so my technical specialty is on Mars and so the landing portion was very important to me and I wanted it to be you know as correct as possible so everything from the shape of the ship to have the right lift-to-drag ratio for the flight through the Mars atmosphere to the use of supersonic retropropulsion technology to light up the thrusters when we're still traveling very fast towards the Mars surface and use those thrusters to move to just the right location on the on the ground at Mars all of that was based on my experience designing similar things now we're at a cab Canyon ok I think we should have taken some more time to find our landing spot here it is oh ok ok all right now we're landing hopefully on a flat surface flat surface see ok great we made it Nat Geo and SpaceX is way of landing on Mars is a great idea there's a lot of testing that we need to do to make sure that it actually works and before we're confident enough to use it to land people on the surface of Mars you see landing on Mars is really tough as we saw with EXO Mars is Schiaparelli Lander which actually made a new crater on the surface of Mars because it came in way too fast but in the meantime it's still really cool to visualize what it might be like to land people on the surface of another planet oh goodness and my feet are barely touching Oh No I'm having again