Home > Lander

A lander is a type of spacecraft which descends to come to rest on the surface of an astronomical body. For bodies with atmospheres, the landing is called re-entry and the lander re-entry vehicle. In this case landers employ aerobraking and parachutes to slow down, often with small landing rockets which fire just before impact to bring the lander to rest relatively gently. The Mars Pathfinder mission also used inflateable airbags to cushion the lander's impact.

The Rosetta probe, launched 2 March 2004, is planned to put a lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-GerasimenkoComets 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is the designation of a comet with a current orbital period of 6. It is the destination of the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft mission, launched on March 2, 2004. Comet parameters Diameter:4 km Orbital period:6. in 20142014 is a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). Events ESAs Rosetta space probe scheduled to arrive at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Winter Olympics, host city scheduled to be chosen in 2007 April 29 Annular solar eclipse June 28 C; due to the extremely low gravity of such bodies, Rosetta's landing system includes a harpoon launcher intended to anchor a cable in the surface and pull it down. A landing on a similarly small body, the asteroidAn asteroid is a small, solid object in our Solar System, orbiting the Sun. An asteroid is an example of a minor planet (or planetoid , which are much smaller than planets. The asteroids are believed to be remnants of the protoplanetary disc which were no 433 ErosThe asteroid 433 Eros was named after the Greek god of love Eros. It is an S-type asteroid approximately 13 × 13 × 33 km in size, the second-largest near-Earth asteroid. It is also a Mars-crosser asteroid. It was visited by the NEAR Shoemaker probe, which, was performed by the satellite NEAR ShoemakerThe Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Shoemaker (NEAR Shoemaker), renamed after its launch in honor of Eugene M. Shoemaker, is an unmanned spacecraft designed to study the near-Earth asteroid Eros from close orbit over a period of a year. The primary scienti despite the fact that NEAR was not originally designed to be capable of landing.

The Galileo probe dropped a small reentry vehicle into the atmosphere of Jupiter, but as Jupiter is a gas giantA gas giant is a large planet that is not composed mostly of rock or other solid matter. Gas giants may still have a rocky or metallic core in fact, it is expected that such a core is probably required for a gas giant to form but the majority of its mass with no well-defined surface it is debatable whether this was a "lander" per se.

A number of Moon probes, such as some members of the Soviet Luna program and the American Ranger program, were hard-impact landers which were not intended to continue providing useful data after their high-speed landings. The Huygens probe, being carried to Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini probe, is likewise not specifically designed to survive landing. However, due to the estimated low speed impact, it is expected to continue providing data for a short while after landing, and even to float should it touch down on one of Titan's hypothesized ethane lakes.

The Soviet Venera program included a number of Venus landers, some of which were crushed during descent much as Galileo's Jupiter "lander" and others of which successfully touched down. The Soviet Vega program also placed two balloons in the Venusian atmosphere.

The Surveyor program was designed to determine where Apollo could land safely; thus these robotic missions required soft landers to sample the lunar soil and determine the thickness of the dust layer, which was unknown before Surveyor. The Apollo Lunar Module used a rocket descent engine for a soft landing of two astronauts on the Moon, each of the six times this was carried out.