My thoughts exactly. The KISS principle for landing on a foreign planet seems to have been given the boot.
Yes and no. Many of the individual elements of the landing were done with the MER rovers:
- guided descent with the aeroshell connected
- slowing with a supersonic parachute
- using a radar altimeter to stop descent at a specified altitude
- propulsively halting descent above the surface
- lowering the payload on a bridle
- cutting the bridle cleanly
The order of the landing elements is different — the MER’s were lowered on the bridle before halting descent as opposed to afterward, and there are of course no airbags, which requires extra precision in managing altitude as well as using weight-on-wheels measurements to trigger cutting the bridle. The divert and fly-away maneuvers are also new.