Complex software is required to traverse terrain with no driver...in a human sense. It is amazing that we have memory and processors that are robust enough to last through two atmospheres and a controlled low altitude bounce sequence.
How Did Navigators Hit Their Precise Landing Target on Mars?
To land in a precise location on Mars after traveling over 300 million miles, navigators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had to overcome the head-spinning challenges of calculating the exact speeds of a rotating Earth, a rotating Mars, and a rotating spacecraft, while they all simultaneously are spinning in their own radical orbits around the Sun. >>
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