Quote:I have no idea why it's necessary to lower it on a winch from a hovering crane, but it looks cool as hell.
Well, the MSL is too big to land using airbags, so it needs braking rockets. Thing is, rockets plus fuel take up a lot of room and add a lot of dead weight. If you're building a static lander like Viking or Phoenix it's not that big of a deal, but when building a rover you've got to take that into account. The simplest way to do it is to put the landing jets on a seperate platform and then cram the rover full of more scientific goodies. As for why the crane, I'm guessing it's because the platform is easy half the size of the rover to begin with, and they don't want to risk landing it safely then watching as the thing falls off the platform 'cause a ramp failed to deploy or something.
Makes sense to *me*, but I tend to think about stuff like this too much.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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