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Mars touchdown: achievement in science and engineering


After ten years of planning, and a budget of $2.5 billion US dollars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the government agency of the United States of America responsible for its space program, has landed the Mars rover, Curiosity, on the Red Planet. Curiosity is the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, without a hitch. NASA representatives said it was a highlight in robotic planetary exploration, but also the hardest, most technologically challenged project they had worked on. NASA’s two other Mars rovers were named Spirit and Opportunity. Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. This Mars landing is a great achievement in science and engineering.

The “rover” weighs one ton, and hung by ropes from a rocket backpack, to touch down on Mars on Monday, August 6, 2012. It took a 36 week flight to arrive at Mars, and it will now begin a two-year investigation of planet Mars.

NASA controlled the mission from California but also tracked it from Tidbinbilla in Canberra, Australia. The tracking station, the Deep Space Communication Complex, in Canberra was the rover’s sole communication link with Earth. The Tidbinbilla tracking station will now upload the software to Curiosity that tells it to change from spacecraft mode to rover mode, so that it can spend the next two years analysing the conditions on Mars.

Curiosity’s first destination will be Mount Sharp, the Gale Crater’s highest peak (5 kilometres high), and the place where the Mars orbiters (spacecraft in flight around Mars) have sighted minerals that are usually formed in water. NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured the Curiosity rover still connected to its 51-foot (16 metre) wide parachute as it descended to its landing site at Gale Crater. Gale Crater is 96 miles (154 kilometres) in diameter. The image was taken while MRO was 211 miles (340 kilometres) from the rover as it parachuted down, and about two miles (3 kilometres) above the Martian surface, however the image was exceptionally clear, showing the strings of the parachute.

Curiosity landed on Mars at 10:32pm, California time on August 5 (1:32am Canberra time on August 6).

Curiosity is essential a one ton (950 kilogram) mobile chemical laboratory. So it will raise its high-gain antenna and use it to collect data as it communicates with Earth. It relays its information to MRO and then to Earth. It carries 10 science instruments with a mass that totals 15 times larger than the science payloads on the Mars rover Spirit, and Mars rover Opportunity. Some tools on Curiosity include a laser-firing instrument for checking the composition of rocks from a distance, which is the first of its kind on Mars. Curiosity will also use a drill and scoop, located at the end of its robotic arm, to collect soil and powder samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into the rover’s analytical laboratory instruments. It will be able to map out minerals to determine whether they contain water or to indicate a “wet” history.

Curiosity is the first step to a possible human landing – a crewed vehicle near or on Mars – perhaps in the 2030s.

For information on the Mars mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/technology/sci-tech/nasas-curiosity-pays-off-with-touchdown-on-mars-20120806-23q8t.html#ixzz22obmTE3Q
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