Airbag landing system

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NASA engineers test the Mars Pathfinder airbag landing system
Video animation of the airbag landing of a Mars Exploration Rover

Airbag landing systems are used in space travel . They are inflated before the impact to cushion it.

In its Luna missions , the Soviet Union successfully used airbags for a soft landing on the moon. Successful landings were made with Luna 9 and 13 as early as 1966.

The American space agency NASA and its supplier and producer of special technology, ILC Dover , took up this idea again only 30 years later. The Mars probes Pathfinder (1997), Spirit (2004) and Opportunity (2004) landed safely on Mars with its system. In the Orion spacecraft planned as the successor to the American space shuttle , airbags are to be used for the first time in a manned spacecraft. The European Mars probe Beagle 2 was supposed to use this system in 2003, but it was lost on landing for reasons that are not entirely clear. The ESA also uses airbags as a landing aid for planned, unmanned lunar missions.

supporting documents

  1. ^ Brian Harvey: Soviet an Russian Lunar Exploration . Praxis Publishing, Chichester, 2007.
  2. ↑ NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Spacecraft: Airbags , as of January 23, 2009.
  3. ↑ Frank Morring, Jr .: Orion Landing Airbag In Works ( Memento from March 22, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). Aviation Week, June 19, 2008.
  4. ↑ Justin Ray: Scientists find obstacle at heart of Beagle landing zone . Spaceflight Now, December 29, 2003.