Summary

Description	Mary from White Plains: Can you explain how the six months of aerobraking works and why it's necessary? When we aerobrake the spacecraft, it's a lot like putting the drag flaps up on an airplane. As an airplane comes in to land, it puts the flaps up on the wings, and it changes the shape of those wings from being a very smooth, aerodynamic surface to something that's really resisting the air and acting like a brake. And we did the same thing with our spacecraft, we fully deploy the solar arrays. They're creating as much friction on the atmosphere as possible. That allows us to slow down in the atmosphere and eventually get into a very low orbit. By doing that, we save on the amount of fuel that we have to carry. That amount of fuel is a big fraction of the weight of the spacecraft. That means we go in a smaller rocket, and that saves us money which we can then put into other things, such as the instruments. So, it, by aerobraking and slowly slowing down, we can bring ourself to a ver
Date	2005-08-18
Source	images.nasa.gov

Licensing

Public Domain (US Government Work)