Hey, everyone, I'm Deysi from Design Squad.

Are you curious about any engineering news lately?

I am.

I'm curious about the Curiosity Rover that just landed on Mars.

The rover will perform science experiments like digging up soil to see if there was ever life on Mars.

It was a really tricky problem for engineers to figure out how to safely land the rover on Mars without it crashing.

Kablooie!

They had to come up with different designs, and they all had to work together perfectl to be able to land the rover safely.

Step one: keep the rover from burning up while entering the Mars atmosphere.

When the rover enters Mars's atmosphere, the friction heats up the spacecraft thousands of degrees.

So, to keep the rover from burning up, engineers designed a heat shield to protect it from the heat.

Step two: slow down the rover so it doesn't crash into Mars.

The heat shield slows the rover to around 1,600 miles per hour because entering Mars's atmosphere slows it down, but it's still going way too fast.

So engineers designed a parachute to slow it down even more.

Step three: slow the rover down even more.

Even with a parachute, the rover is still traveling too fast to land safely, so the parachute detaches, leaving the rover attached to a platform with rockets.

These rockets let it descend slowly.

Step four: the crane.

The last step, probably the craziest part of it all, the rover gets lowered down by a crane.

Why a crane?

The rockets can't take the rover all the way down to the surface because they'd blow too much dust and dirt all over the place.

That would damage the rover.

So the rover needs to be gently lowered by cables.

As soon as the rover touches down, the cables are cut and the rocket platform flies away, leaving Curiosity safe on the ground.

You'll be glad to know that everything went perfectl and the rover landed safely.

It's already sending pictures back from Mars to Earth.

Pretty amazing engineering, huh?