[ExI] Landing Rover on Mars

[Mike Dougherty]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 1:04 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> This lander is the controls engineers' playground, but oh boy is it scary.
> There is no practical way to really test it in a 1G field: you need to run
> your computer simulations and do every calculation carefully and repeatedly,
> check it over and over, and when you are finished go straight to the closest
> church or synagogue, get down on your knees and pray to evolution that it
> works.

Is there a moon version that'd be literally a bit closer to home?  Or
is that too costly a test for too little payback?

While watching this I was thinking about what kind of approach aliens
might use to put a lander on Earth.  Suppose various asteroids were
information gathering preamble to a larger lander.  Possibly the
Tunguska event was an early mishap (or success if the 1m rock at the
bottom of Lake Cheko is the payload)   But what might a
extra-terrestrial lander look like to us if it were launched FROM us
given a similar level of commitment to getting a lander safely onto
Mars?