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I am seeing Life (2017) movie, movie showed ISS dropped escape pod to the land, when it reaches certain height, escape pod release parachute & near the water surface, thrusters got activated.

enter image description here

you can see here six side smoke is coming out;thrusters, if it is landing on water then Why escape pods activates it thrusters?

The Hawk
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    I'd recommend you change you question the same way I suggested earlier. Ask if this would be necessary for a real capsule in reality. Name a few, like Dragon and Soyuz and ask about them, not about a fictitious movie capsule. Or if you want to ask about the movie, ask in movies or scifi stackexchange, not here. – uhoh Jun 11 '17 at 14:19
  • hello @uhoh can you edit it more clear this question, so i can post there, right now it has poor english framing in my post. – The Hawk Jun 11 '17 at 14:25
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    Take your time, but give it a try. Poor english is often allowed/improved here if the question is good. But you should ask about a real capsule, not a movie capsule! – uhoh Jun 11 '17 at 14:28

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That doesn't look like any landing pod currently in use - at least, I don't recognize the shape.

However, it's quite common to have soft-landing retrorockets on a capsule. Soyuz fires a brief pulse before landing to take the edge off the g-forces on a ground landing. Using retrorockets on a water landing is a bit more uncommon. The Soyuz hasn't tried water landing, AFAIK, so I don't know what the protocol for that would be.

0xDBFB7
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  • If you have landing rockets why not fire them even when it's a water landing? – Loren Pechtel Jun 11 '17 at 18:56
  • @LorenPechtel Soyuz retrorocket burns are incredibly high-g, very uncomfortable. It may be worse than a splashdown in some cases. – 0xDBFB7 Jun 11 '17 at 22:08
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    Water isn't much different from solid ground if you hit it fast enough with enough area. I believe there is a question about it over at [physics.se], but the gist is: the water doesn't have enough time to "get out of the way". – Jörg W Mittag Jun 11 '17 at 23:01
  • @JörgWMittag I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that most capsules that do not use landing retrorockets can only land in water, because the acceleration would be too high on ground. Soyuz has a landing speed of 8 m/s before retrorockets fire, so it's slow enough that hydrodynamics can occur. – 0xDBFB7 Jun 11 '17 at 23:07
  • I can't picture retrorockets that are harsher than the water landing would be without them. – Loren Pechtel Jun 11 '17 at 23:18
  • @LorenPechtel I can't find any real data on splashdown Gs, but you're probably right. I'm not sure why I thought otherwise. – 0xDBFB7 Jun 12 '17 at 01:35
  • Remember that Apollo was perfectly capable of making a water landing with parachutes alone, but landing without parachutes was not survivable on either land or water. IIRC landing on land with parachutes was considered dicey and something to be avoided if at all possible. – user Jun 12 '17 at 09:06
  • Soyuz 23 landed in a lake. – Rainer P. Jun 12 '17 at 20:23