More than nine months after launching successfully from Cape Canaveral, the Mars Space Laboratory (MSL) and the Curiosity rover are making their final approach to the Red Planet.
At approximately 1:31 a.m. EDT on Monday, August 6, the rover will complete its 350 million-mile journey and touch down on Mars to investigate whether the planet could have previously supported life, study its climate and geology, and evaluate the potential for a manned mission. But flinging an 8,580-pound spacecraft across the universe and safely landing it on a precise site not much larger than the island of Manhattan is no easy feat.
How Will Curiosity Land?
If you think NBC's delay of Olympic coverage has been excruciating, just try waiting out Curiosity's delay. The rover will slow from 13,000 miles per hour to a soft landing in just seven minutes.
"From the top of the atmosphere, down to the surface, it takes us seven minutes. It takes 14 minutes or so for the signal from the spacecraft to make it to Earth. That's how far Mars is away from us," Adam Steltzner, EDL engineer, explained in a video (below). "So, when we first get word that we've touched the top of the atmosphere, the vehicle has been aliveor deadon the surface for at least seven minutes."
Previous missions to Mars have used airbags to cushion the landing of the spacecrafts, but given that the MSL weighs about 10 times more than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, the method will not work. Instead, Curiosity will use a new landing scheme divided into four parts: guided entry, parachute descent, powered descent, and sky crane.
Where Will Curiosity Land?
There is no well-lit runway guiding Curiosity to safety. Rather, the rover will land on the dusty ground of the 96-mile wide Gale Crater near the foot of Aeolis Mons, formerly Mount Sharp. The landing site was selected from four potential locations based on an analysis of safety concerns and diversity of features. Gale Crater is ideal for studying changing environmental conditions. The spot has an alluvial, fan-shaped deposit likely once created by sediments carried by water, while exposed layers near the bottom of Gale's mountain contain sulfates and clay, both of which are typically formed in the presence of water. The crater is very low in elevation and, as we know, water runs downhill. Scientists hope that site's morphologic and mineralogic evidence of water are more apt to contain traces of microbial life. For more, click the image at right.
The original target landing ellipse was 12 miles wide and 16 miles long, but scientists and engineers have been able to shrink that down to four miles wide and 12 miles long because of greater confidence in the landing technology aboard the spacecraft. This adjustment could trim the distance Curiosity has to drive by almost half, said Pete Theisinger, Mars Science Laboratory project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), getting the rover to the mountain months earlier.
Check back soon for more updates on Curiosity's progress as PCMag reports from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Until then, check out the slideshow above, which includes shots from PCMag's recent tour of JPL.