How are we going to land on Mars without crashing and burning?

SyFy Wire (Feb. 20) -- Mars is in our future, but first we need to figure out how to actually land the heavy spacecraft that will have humans as part of its payload—in one piece. Now a study recently published in the Journal of Spaceraft and Rockets has figured out how we can land heavier spacecraft without a dent.  “Unfortunately, parachute systems do not scale well with increasing vehicle mass. The new idea is to eliminate the parachute and use larger rocket engines for descent,” said Zach Putnam, co-author of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.