soft landing
noun
1A controlled landing of a spacecraft during which no serious damage is incurred.The Shuttle made a soft landing on the landing pad....
- Foton doesn't rely only on parachutes for its soft landing: there is also a retro-rocket system that ignites as the package nears the ground.
- After being fully decelerated by the atmosphere, the Hayabusa capsule is designed to deploy a parachute for a soft landing in June 2007, in, as it stands now, south Australia.
1.1The slowing down of economic growth at an acceptable degree relative to inflation and unemployment.The aim is to achieve what economists call a soft landing, turning that headlong rush into continued, sustainable growth....
- Although the economy is projected to come off that growth peak, commentators are predicting a soft landing, with growth slowing to just below trend.
- Xiao said he believed the economy would have a soft landing because the recent macro-economic index had demonstrated the effectiveness of austerity measures adopted this year.
Derivatives
soft-land
- Twenty-five years ago, on July 20, 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander soft-landed on the surface of Mars, becoming the first successful mission to land on the Red Planet, as well as the first successful American landing on another planet.
- The station successfully soft-landed on the Oceanus Procellarum, or ‘Ocean of Storms ‘on 3 February 1966.’
- The surface of Venus has been seen by a series of seven Soviet probes that soft-landed on Venus between 1985 and 1992.
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