NASA preps for ‘7 minutes of terror’ on Mars

[T]hey have to get the lander on the ground, and that’s where the worry comes in. In fact, they have a name for it in the Mars exploration community: “seven minutes of terror.”

Seven minutes is all it takes for a spacecraft travelling neary 13,000 miles per hour to hit the Martian atmosphere, slam on the brakes and reach the ground.

And then there’s this tidbit, with the resulting obligatory snark:

Historically, 55 percent of Mars missions have ended in failure.

I’ll bet the odds go up when you don’t mix up metric and English units.

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Good luck to them.

UPDATE: SUCCESS! Animation of the landing and some subsequent operations