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3 As expected, Spirit approached the Martian atmosphere first. She
had made it this far, but landing on Mars would be tricky, requiring split-
second timing. Many things could go wrong, fatally wrong. If the lander
didn’t pass through the atmosphere just right, it would burn up from
friction. A parachute and retrorockets were supposed to slow the rover’s
screaming descent, but if they didn’t deploy, the spacecraft would be
smashed to a million pieces. The final stage of landing would be free fall,
from 30 feet (9 m) in the air, protected only by a cushion of airbags that
encircled the robot. Even if all went well, Spirit would bounce like a

superball—as much as six stories high—time and time again. Finally she
would roll to a stop, but no one knew where or in what condition.
4 Steve Squyres and his team knew that the landing would take about
six minutes. They also knew that radio signals from Mars take ten minutes
to reach Earth. This meant that for ten minutes of terror, scientists
couldn’t correct anything that went wrong. “We would be helpless,”
Steve said. “Watching . . . waiting . . .”

deploy If you deploy something, you move it into position so it can be used.

The entry, descent, and landing (EDL) phase begins when To slow the lander’s speed,
the spacecraft reaches the Mars atmospheric entry point, retrorockets fire. Airbags inflate
about 2,113 miles (3522.2 km) from the center of Mars. to cushion the fall.

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