Curiosity Rover nears Mars

[Rogie]

The Curiosity Rover - also called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) - is set to land on Monday (GMT) for a minimum two-year exploration of a deep hole on Mars' equator known as Gale Crater.

 

Touch-down is expected at 05:31 GMT (06:31 BST) Monday 6 August; 22:31 PDT, Sunday 5 August.

 

Curiosity dwarfs all previous landing missions undertaken by the Americans.

At 900kg, it's a behemoth. It's nearly a hundred times more massive than the first robot rover Nasa sent to Mars in 1997.

 

Curiosity will trundle around the foothills of Mount Sharp much like a human field geologist might walk through Mojave's valleys. Except the rover has more than a hammer in its rucksack.

 

It has hi-res cameras to look for features of interest. If a particular boulder catches the eye, Curiosity can zap it with an infrared laser and examine the resulting surface spark to query the rock's elemental composition.

 

If that signature intrigues, the rover will use its long arm to swing over a microscope and an X-ray spectrometer to take a closer look.

 

Still interested? Curiosity can drill into the boulder and deliver a powdered sample to two high-spec analytical boxes inside the rover belly.

 

These will lay bare the rock's precise make-up, and the conditions under which it formed.

 

"We're not just scratching and sniffing and taking pictures - we're boring into rock, getting that powder and analysing it in these laboratories," deputy project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada, told the BBC.

 

"These are really university laboratories that would normally fill up a room but which have been shrunk down - miniaturised - and made safe for the space environment, and then flown on this rover to Mars."

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-19112800

[kokopelli]

Hope NASA learned a lesson when they sent one probe to Mars which was designed by Engineers and programmed by Scientists (or vice-versa) ; English units and Metric units were not compatible. Hard to believe such a blunder could happen.

 

What is most intriguing about this mission is the manner whereby the rover will be lowered by cables from a hovering rocket powered craft. Like Navy Seals repelling down from a helicopter. If it works it really will be an outstanding achievement.

[Bob]

I've been looking forward to this one for over a year. An extremely complicated landing process and, if it works, that alone will be almost miraculous.

[Rogie]

As a retired scientist it was the laboratory that interested me most. That is why I focussed on that in the quote in my OP.

 

"These are really university laboratories that would normally fill up a room but which have been shrunk down - miniaturised - and made safe for the space environment, and then flown on this rover to Mars"

 

But there's so much more.

 

The Horizon programmee Mission to Mars referred to in the link was what ensnared me. I agree with Koko and Bob re the landing sequence. It is very ambitious - miraculous? quite possibly!

[Rogie]

Curiosity has landed!

 

You'd think they'd all won Olympic gold medals - great scenes of jubilation inside the control room. Fascinating to watch.

 

Nasa's Curiosity rover successfully lands on Mars

 

The US space agency has just landed a huge new robot rover on Mars.

 

The one-tonne vehicle, known as Curiosity, touched down in a deep crater near the planet's equator after a plunging through the atmosphere.

 

It is going to look for evidence that Mars could once have supported life.

 

A signal confirming the rover was on the ground safely was relayed to Earth via Nasa's Odyssey satellite, which is in orbit around the Red Planet.

 

The first pictures from the surface began to be fed back immediately

 

The success was greeted with a roar of approval here at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

 

The mission has even already sent its first low-resolution images - showing the rover's wheel and its shadow, through a dust-covered lens cap that has yet to be removed.

 

A first colour image of Curiosity's surroundings should be returned in the next couple of days.

Engineers and scientists who have worked on this project for the best part of 10 years punched the air and hugged each other.

 

The descent through the atmosphere after a 570-million-km journey from Earth had been billed as the "seven minutes of terror" - the time it would take to complete a series of high-risk manoeuvres that would slow the rover from an entry speed of 20,000km/h to just 1m/s to allow its wheels to set down softly.

 

The mission team will now spend the next few hours assessing the health of the vehicle (also referred to as the Mars Science Laboratory, MSL).

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-19144464

[Guest fountainhall]

I reckon those mission controllers deserve a great deal more than the equivalent of Olympic Gold Medals. Just thinking what it has taken to get that vehicle from earth safely on to the surface of Mars is, as Bob describes it, "miraculous".

[kokopelli]

This brings on another quick quiz! When Curiosity left Earth it weighed one tonne/ton = 2000 lbs but when it landed on Mars it only weighed 760 lbs. What happened to those 1240 lbs???

[Rogie]

Without checking I'll just hazard a guess Sir Isaac Newton has something to do with it

[Rogie]

One of the great astronomers, Sir Bernard Lovell of Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire, England, has died, aged 98.

 

The celebrated physicist and radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell has died at the age of 98, the University of Manchester has announced.

 

Lovell, who died on Monday night, was the university's emeritus professor of radio astronomy and the founder and first director of Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire.

 

In a statement, the university said his legacy was immense and that he was "a great man" and would be sorely missed".

 

Jodrell Bank is dominated by the 76-metre (250ft) Lovell telescope, conceived by the astronomer.

 

Lovell began working with the engineer Sir Charles Husband to build the telescope in 1945 and it has since become a symbol of British science and engineering and a landmark in the Cheshire countryside.

 

A hugely ambitious project at the time, the telescope was the world's largest when it was completed in 1957 and within days tracked the rocket that carried Sputnik 1 into orbit, marking the dawn of the space age.

 

It is still the third largest steerable telescope in the world and a series of upgrades means it is now more capable than ever, observing phenomena undreamed of when it was first conceived. The telescope plays a key role in world-leading research on pulsars, testing our understanding of extreme physics including Einstein's general theory of relativity.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/07/jodrell-bank-observatory-bernard-lovell-dies

[KhorTose]

This brings on another quick quiz! When Curiosity left Earth it weighed one tonne/ton = 2000 lbs but when it landed on Mars it only weighed 760 lbs. What happened to those 1240 lbs???

 

The perfect solution to my growing weight problem. I am moving to mars tomorrow., unless they first open a vacation cabin on the moon.

[kokopelli]

Yes, Sir Issac Newton and his laws of gravitation does indeed give the answer to the loss of weight of Curiosity. The gravity on Mars is much less than Earth and Curiosity thus "lost" weight although it's mass remained the same.

[Rogie]

Mars rover finally looks set to drill

 

 

Nasa's Curiosity rover is very close to drilling into its first Martian rock, with the set-up operation likely to begin next week.

 

The robot has driven about 650m from its landing site, dropping down into a depression known as Yellowknife Bay.

It is in this depression that the target rock will probably be chosen.

All of Curiosity's instruments have been commissioned. The drill is the only tool that has yet to be deployed.

Its hammer action will enable the device to retrieve powdered samples from up to 5cm inside the rock, which can then passed to the rover's onboard laboratories for analysis.

 

Lead scientist John Grotzinger has this to say: 

 

"The place where Curiosity is right now is a small stack of layers - very impressive - and they could be 3-3.5 billion years old, and so we're very excited about this because unlike the soil which we were analysing before the holiday season - a loose, windswept patch of dirt on the surface of Mars - we're now going to start digging down into the very ancient bedrock which we really built the rover to look at," explained Prof Grotzinger.

 

"We use these layers as a sort of recording device of past events and conditions, and the rover has the same kind of analytical capability that we would use here on Earth to tell us about the early environmental conditions; and, if life had ever evolved, [whether it would] be the kind of environment that would have been conducive towards sustaining that life."

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20901931