NASA is set to land an exploratory vehicle on the planet Mars early Monday morning.

The nuclear powered, one-ton rover, called Curiosity, will hunt for evidence of microbes on Mars and harvest a host of data and images from the planet.  But first it has to land safely, completing an eight-month journey.

NASA scientists say the landing of the Curiosity, which is traveling at a speed of 21,240 kilometers per hour, is the most challenging they have ever attempted.

If the landing is successful, Curiosity will begin unlocking clues about possible life on Mars.

The rover is the size of a car, and has 17 cameras, a robotic arm, a laser and a drill.

If Curiosity carried business cards, they might read: "Curiosity, geochemist, U.S. space agency."

Curiosity is the first rover that has the ability to sample rocks and soil on Mars and analyze them using instruments within the rover.  

Mars Exploration Program lead scientist Michael Meyer praised the sophisticated new rover at a NASA news briefing.

"It is a laboratory," Meyer stressed.  "It's amazing that we can do chemistry and we can do mineralogy there on the surface, and, in many ways, any geologist would die to have something like this with them when they're out in the field."  

The Curiosity rover is the centerpiece of the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission.  It launched aboard an Atlas V rocket last November.  Since then, it has traveled some 560 million kilometers toward its destination, the Red Planet.

The nuclear-powered Curiosity will investigate Martian geology, weather and radiation levels during its two-year mission on Mars.  The main goal is to see if the area ever had environmental conditions that could have supported microbial life, but it's not a life detection mission.  



A team of space agency scientists selected the landing site -- the foot of a mountain within a deep, 150-kilometer-wide depression called Gale Crater.  The peak is informally known as Mount Sharp.

Project Scientist John Grotzinger says the mountain's layers provide a record of the way Mars evolved.

"This Mount Sharp that sticks up gives us this time dimension that has never been explored before," he explained.

Radiation spikes

The Mars Science Lab is already yielding data.  Its Radiation Assessment Detector has been collecting information during the journey to Mars.  That's helpful as NASA develops plans to send astronauts to Mars one day.

Don Hassler, the principal investigator for the radiation detector, says scientists noted radiation spikes.  He said they were not at lethal levels, but they would factor into the radiation dose limit that NASA has established for astronauts.
    
"It's a significant fraction," Hassler told reporters. "We're still analyzing those and reducing those data to get the exact numbers, but it's a significant contribution to an astronaut's career limit."

"7 minutes of terror"

Before Curiosity touches down on the Martian surface, it faces a harrowing entry and descent.  

The craft will be functioning autonomously.  In fact, NASA engineers will not even be able to witness the events in real time because it takes 14 minutes for radio signals to reach Earth from Mars.

Curiosity will be traveling at about 20,000 kilometers per hour when it hits the thin Martian atmosphere.  It will have only seven minutes to reduce its speed to about three kilometers per hour to make a soft landing on the dusty surface of Mars.

First, it has to steer itself to stay on course for the landing site.  Then, a parachute will deploy to slow its descent.  There's no back-up parachute if something goes wrong.  After the rover separates from the parachute, its rocket backpack fires up for a powered descent.  Then a skycrane will lower Curiosity on cables to the Martian surface before cutting loose.
  
Engineers had to develop this new system for Curiosity because it is too heavy to use the airbag system that worked for smaller rovers.

NASA engineers refer to this entry, descent and landing period as "seven minutes of terror."  

Excitement,  anxiety

Adam Steltzner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says three of those seven minutes will be particularly grueling.  

"Certainly the novelty of the guided entry and especially the novelty of the skycrane maneuver at the end draw a lot of the attention of the team's anxiety.  There's also that parachute that we use.  It ends up that parachutes are fundamentally sketchy kinds of devices, right?"

If successful, Curiosity will be the seventh NASA spacecraft to land on the Red Planet.


http://www.voanews.com/content/nasa-set-...55501.html

This post was last modified: 08-06-2012 12:57 AM by skyblue1 .

Mars rover Curiosity safely lands on Mars
Images arrive at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory soon after Curiosity touches down to begin its search for signs of life on the Red Planet.

Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, stuck its extraordinary landing Sunday night without a hitch and is poised to begin its pioneering two-year hunt for the building blocks of life — signs that Earth's creatures may not be alone in the universe.

Applause erupted across the campus of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge and engineers inside mission control could be seen hugging and weeping with joy. Al Chen, an engineer on Curiosity's entry, descent and landing team, said the words that space scientists had been waiting on for 10 years: "Touchdown confirmed."

"We did it again!" another engineer shouted.


The landing site was 154 million miles from home, enough distance that the spacecraft's elaborate landing sequence had to be automated. The Earth also "set" below the Mars horizon shortly before landing, making even delayed direct communication with mission control impossible — and confirmation of Curiosity's fate tricky.

Engineers were waiting for a passing satellite, Odyssey, to relay a series of three messages from Curiosity. One would indicate the robot's rough position and how hard it had landed; another would indicate that it was no longer moving; and a third would indicate that the spacecraft was emitting a continuous stream of communication.

If Curiosity's success is confirmed, it would be a moment of triumph for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the $2.5-billion mission.


Curiosity is expected to revolutionize the understanding of Mars, gathering evidence that Mars is or was capable of fostering life, probably in microbial form.

The spacecraft is also expected to pave the way for important leaps in deep-space exploration, including bringing Martian rock or soil back to Earth for detailed analysis and, eventually, human exploration. President Obama has established a goal of sending astronauts to Mars in the 2030s — and John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator, said on Sunday that humans might one day live there too.

"Curiosity has captured the imagination of the world," Grunsfeld said before the landing. "We're about to do something that I think is just huge for humankind."


A six-wheeled, nuclear-powered geochemistry laboratory, Curiosity is the size of a small car — five times heavier and twice as long as previous Mars rovers. It is equipped with a suite of powerful instruments, including 17 cameras, lasers and a radiation detector. The rover can bore into rock and ingest samples, drawing them into an on-board chemistry lab and then sending the lab results home.

The primary mission is expected to last for at least one Martian year, or 687 Earth days.

Previous NASA missions have found evidence that Mars, now a cold and dry planet, had a warmer, watery past, so much so that scientists think of it as Earth's space cousin. Every environment on Earth that contains liquid water also sustains life. Curiosity will search for the other building blocks of life, particularly carbon-carrying organic molecules.

"Mars looks like it has been habitable," said Michael Meyer, a leader of NAS......


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-...8752.story

This is amazing!

What got me really really excited about this mission is that NASA now has the ability to land a man on Mars.

They can now perfect this technique by dropping off, in advance, the supplies, shelter and fuel needed for a manned return trip.

Landing a human on Mars is still some years away.

Perhaps in the childrens lifetimes, it may happen

It has been my impression that the main problems are keeping astronauts alive on the way, including shielding from radiation, recycling basic elements, oh and keeping them from killing each other and themselves.  

Kim Stanley Robinson has them in a colony in Antarctica for a year (I think...it's been awhile, but I think it was a year) as a way of picking off good and bad choices for the ride over.  If I recall correctly, the First Hundred (as they are called later in the Mars trilogy) were whittled down from well over ten thousand.  Most of those characters had good reasons to be excluded.  Oh, and they had a stow-away.

Seems legit.

This post was last modified: 08-08-2012 01:38 AM by Lang.

is there a link to that?

Link to what?  KSR or the problems with keeping people alive?  

Each was off the top of my head, sorry to say.  

Kim Stanley Robinson writes fiction by the way.

Obama has said 2030 for what that's worth!

KSR and the Antartica experiment

Yeah, it's fiction.  LOL.  Too bad, no?  It was not an experiment either, but a selection process.  Though that's not what the characters were told when they were undergoing it.  

The books in the trilogy are Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.  There is also a collection of short stories that take place in the same setting which I haven't read.  But it is titled Rainbow Mars, and I hope to pick it up some time.  

I'm sure they are available from Amazon or a local bookstore.  They're good, I enjoyed them.  KSR is a good author.  He's also very political, if you're interested in that.

This post was last modified: 08-08-2012 01:52 AM by Lang.

Curiosity was measuring radiation levels all the way there precisely for the purpose of working out what shielding will be required for humans.

They are still analysing the data.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't it be possible to go underground and be shielded from radiation that way?

Of course they will still need to go out onto the surface sometimes, so maybe it doesn't matter.

This post was last modified: 08-08-2012 01:57 AM by Lang.

Oh, I thought he was conducting a real project

Thanks for the info

send the tanning bed mom, she could probably handle it