Well it's almost time when the Phoenix Lander will land (I hope) on Mars at the end of this month! My question however is why are we going back to old way of landing a probe on Mars? Why not the airbag method this time? Isn't the airbag method 3/3 now? What's the parachute/rocket rate of failure? I know it didn't work so well for the Polar Lander.

Please tell me they made some improvements? I would like to read an article to make me feel better about this landing. I don't want to see NASA FAILURE! All over the news again. Can someone point me in the right direction on maybe why they went back to this type of method and hopefully they learned from the mistakes they made with the Polar Lander? Let me know...thank you.

I'm pretty sure the only other things to rocket to the surface of mars were the Viking landers and both of those made it to the surface without crashing. So I think the rockets have a better track record then the balloon bouncing method.

Here's a previous thread on the subject.
question regarding the phoenix lander

The article I linked to:

http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exp...tml?c=y&page=1

covers the tradeoffs pretty well. There is no option that can be truly guaranteed not to fail. Rather, there are just engineering tradeoffs.

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Thanks a lot! Good information to know!