Curiosity sets down on Mars, beams first image
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AP This photo released by NASA's JPL, shows one of the first images taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars on Sunday evening.
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AP In a photo provided by NASA, the Mars Science Laboratory team in the MSL Mission Support Area reacts after learning the the Curiosity rover has landed safely on Mars and images start coming in at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Mars, in Pasadena, California.
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AP In this photo released by NASA's JPL, Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) team members talk in the MSL Mission Support Area at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ahead of the planned landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, in Pasadena, California on Sunday.
In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity
blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle
landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the
red planet’s past.
A chorus of cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion
Laboratory on Sunday night after the most high-tech interplanetary rover
ever built sent a signal to Earth. It had survived a harrowing plunge
through the thin Mars atmosphere.
“Touchdown confirmed,” said engineer Allen Chen. “We’re safe on Mars.”
Minutes after touchdown, Curiosity beamed back the first pictures from
the surface showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.
It was NASA’s seventh landing on Earth’s neighbour; many other attempts
by the U.S. and other countries to zip past, circle or set down on Mars
have gone awry.
The arrival was an engineering tour de force, debuting
never-before-tried acrobatics packed into “seven minutes of terror” as
Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at 20,920.5 kph.
In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered the rover to the
ground at a snail-paced 2 mph. A video camera was set to capture the
most dramatic moments which would give earthlings their first glimpse of
a touchdown on another world.
The extraterrestrial feat injected a much-needed boost to NASA, which is
debating whether it can afford another Mars landing this decade. At a
budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is the priciest gamble yet, which
scientists hope will pay off with a bonanza of discoveries.
Over the next two years, Curiosity will drive over to a mountain rising
from the crater floor, poke into rocks and scoop up rust-tinted soil to
see if the region ever had the right environment for microscopic
organisms to thrive. It’s the latest chapter in the long-running quest
to find out whether primitive life arose early in the planet’s history.
The voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million
miles (566 million kilometers). The trickiest part of the journey? The
landing. Because Curiosity weighs nearly a ton, engineers drummed up a
new and more controlled way to set the rover down. The last Mars rovers,
twins Spirit and Opportunity, were cocooned in air bags and bounced to a
stop in 2004.
The plans for Curiosity called for a series of braking tricks, similar
to those used by the space shuttle, and a supersonic parachute to slow
it down. Next - Ditch the heat shield used for the fiery descent.
And in a new twist, engineers came up with a way to lower the rover by
cable from a hovering rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords
cut and the rocket stage crashed a distance away.
The nuclear-powered Curiosity, the size of a small car, is packed with
scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. It sports a robotic arm
with a power drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab
to sniff for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to
measure dangerous radiation on the surface.
It also tracked radiation levels during the journey to help NASA better
understand the risks astronauts could face on a future manned trip.
After several weeks of health checkups, the six-wheel rover could take its first short drive and flex its robotic arm.
The landing site near Mars’ equator was picked because there are signs
of past water everywhere, meeting one of the requirements for life as we
know it. Inside Gale Crater is a 5-kilometre-high mountain, and images
from space show the base appears rich in minerals that formed in the
presence of water.
Previous trips to Mars have uncovered ice near the Martian north pole
and evidence that water once flowed when the planet was wetter and
toastier unlike today’s harsh, frigid desert environment.
Curiosity’s goal: to scour for basic ingredients essential for life
including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and oxygen. It’s not
equipped to search for living or fossil microorganisms. To get a
definitive answer, a future mission needs to fly Martian rocks and soil
back to Earth to be examined by powerful laboratories.
The mission comes as NASA retools its Mars exploration strategy. Faced
with tough economic times, the space agency pulled out of partnership
with the European Space Agency to land a rock-collecting rover in 2018.
The Europeans have since teamed with the Russians as NASA decides on a
new roadmap.
Despite Mars’ reputation as a spacecraft graveyard, humans continue
their love affair with the planet, lobbing spacecraft in search of clues
about its early history. Out of more than three dozen attempts flybys,
orbiters and landings by the U.S., Soviet Union, Europe and Japan since
the 1960s, more than half have ended disastrously.
One NASA rover that defied expectations is Opportunity, which is still
busy wheeling around the rim of a crater in the Martian southern
hemisphere eight years later.
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