Mary from White Plains: Can you explain how the six months of aerobraking works and why it's necessary?
Sure. 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 very low altitude over the planet that lets us get closer to the
planet and use our high-resolution camera to get the best pictures and our other instruments,
as well, get closest to the surface as possible and get the best data that we can.