Innovation Blog
Innovation on Mars
As Curiosity touches down safely on Mars it is a triumph of innovative problem solving on a grand scale. Particularly the descent stage through the Martian atmosphere meant NASA had to demonstrate one of the key elements required for successful innovation – persistence.
The problem engineers were faced with was that Curiosity was too heavy (it’s the size of a car) and Mars’s atmosphere was too thin (less than 1% of Earth’s) to use drag alone to slow incoming craft down.
The obvious solution would be to do what missions to the moon (where there is no atmosphere) have done for years and use retro-rockets to slow the descent, however using this method alone would entail carrying too much fuel across the solar system.
And that’s where persistent innovation took over as no single solution would solve the whole problem, so they adopted an iterative problem-solving approach. As each step in the solution addressed one issue it would raise another smaller knock-on problem which became the focus of yet more innovation. In the end it took five distinct steps to fully control the descent phase:
- They used whatever braking that the atmosphere could give, slowing the craft down to a more manageable speed, protected by a traditional heat-shield
- Then special parachutes further slowed the craft as it neared the surface
- With the speed slow enough, the parachutes were cut loose and retro rockets were used to provide a slow, controlled final part of the landing
- Even after using three different solutions, Curiosity could not simply be rested on the surface as the exhausts of the retro rockets would damage it so as it neared the surface, the lander was lowered on cables from the hovering craft and gently placed on the surface of Mars
- Once Curiosity’s wheels were confirmed on the surface the cables connecting the two parts of the craft were blown so that the retro-rockets could take the spent stages far away from Curiosity, crashing harmlessly in the dust hundreds of metres away
At each stage of the design process, engineers could’ve given up as each individual innovation didn’t completely solve the problem. However as we now know they persisted and successfully achieved their goal.
So the message from Mars is not to give up on that game-changing idea when obstacles are put in your way. Successful innovation involves a great deal of persistence, just ask James Dyson whose idea for a new vacuum cleaner was famously rejected by all the major manufacturers before he made it a success by manufacturing them himself.
By Brian Carrington, August 2012
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