scigeek42

In that case, couldn't they just coat the finger with the same stuff they're coating the 3D printed replica with? Actually, how are they getting around the RF issue?

I have to ask the morbid question, why couldn't they use the dead man's fingers directly?

Wouldn't it be awesome if future Mars science missions had a nice, constant landing platform they could design around? Like a new rover or stationary science base would just be "one Dragon unit of cargo".

Ars has really been getting into the whole Red Dragon mission this past week. I am very hopeful this is a sign of things to come. Namely a greater media focus on advances in space exploration, which hopefully leads to a greater "buy-in" from the public.

In the book it describes how the difficulty with the calculation came from the fact that they were continuously firing the spacecraft thrusters (it was some form of drive that used a constant small acceleration). Thus far most all of our probes use short-term bursts to change their velocities. I'm not sure how many ion-engine equipped probes we have that have needed to calculate multiple slingshot manoeuvres.

In his interview with Adam Savage the author described how he wound up writing his own custom code to calculate the trajectories of their spacecraft. One could imagine that NASA would need to consider a lot more "real-world" variables than a sci-fi author, so it is somewhat reasonable to think time on a supercomputer could have come in handy.