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| Anxiety over Hollywood-style Mars landing | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: 4 Aug 2012, 01:45 AM (78 Views) | |
| skibboy | 4 Aug 2012, 01:45 AM Post #1 |
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Anxiety over Hollywood-style Mars landing It sounds like a Hollywood thriller, but the phrase describes the anxiety NASA is expecting as its car-sized robotic rover tries a tricky landing on Mars late on Sunday. Skimming the top of the Martian atmosphere at 21,000km/h, the Curiosity rover needs to brake to a stop - in seven minutes. The rover is headed for a two-year mission to study whether Mars ever had the elements needed for microbial life. Because of its heft, the 900-kilogram robot can't land the way previous spacecraft did. They relied on airbags to cushion a bouncy touchdown. This time NASA is testing a brand new landing that involves gingerly setting down the rover similar to the way heavy-lift helicopters lower huge loads at the end of a cable. How hard is it? "The degree of difficulty is above a 10," says Adam Steltzner, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission. And American University space policy analyst Howard McCurdy says: "It would be a major technological step forward if it works. It's a big gamble." A communication time delay between Mars and Earth means Curiosity will have to nail the landing by itself, following the half million lines of computer code that engineers uploaded to direct its every move. After an eight-and-half-month, 566-million-km journey, here's a step-by-step look at how Curiosity will land: Ten minutes before entering the Martian atmosphere, Curiosity will separate from the capsule that carried it to Mars. Turning its protective heat shield forward, it will streak through the atmosphere at 21,240km/h, slowing itself with a series of S-curves. Eleven km from the ground at 1420km/h, its enormous parachute will unfurl. At eight km from touchdown and closing in at 450km/h, it will shed its heat shield and turn on radar to scope out the landing site. A video camera aboard Curiosity will start to record the descent and 1.6km from landing, the parachute will be jettisoned. Rockets in its "backpack" will then be used to slow it to less than 3.2km/h. Twelve seconds before landing, nylon cables will be released and lower Curiosity. Once it senses six wheels on the ground, the cords will be cuts. The hovering rocket-powered backpack will fly out of the way and crash some distance away. source: news.com.au |
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| skibboy | 4 Aug 2012, 01:59 AM Post #2 |
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7 Minutes of Terror before landing on Mars Watch the NASA mini-documentary about their plans to land the Mars Curiosity probe on the red planet. video: http://video.heraldsun.com.au/2263369341/7-Minutes-of-Terror-before-landing-on-Mars source: heraldsun.com.au |
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| skibboy | 4 Aug 2012, 02:06 AM Post #3 |
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Live stream: Curiosity landing From: The Australian August 03, 2012 View the live coverage from NASA TV on the Mars Rover landing. source/video: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/live-stream-curiosity-landing/story-e6frg6n6-1226442149626 |
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| skibboy | 5 Aug 2012, 01:54 AM Post #4 |
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Opportunity plugs away as new Mars probe nears landing By Matt Smith, CNN August 4, 2012 (CNN) -- In more than eight Earth years, NASA's unexpectedly tough Mars rover Opportunity has been stuck in a sand dune, nursed a bad shoulder and endured five brutal winters on Mars. Its new rover, Curiosity, should be so lucky. Scientists at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California planned for Opportunity to last for 90 days on Mars after its landing in 2004. Instead, it's now run for more than 3,000 martian days and traversed 22 miles of the planet's surface -- scoured by sandstorms and working through temperatures that range from 86 degrees to 112 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (30 to -80 C). "The rovers were designed to last in extreme conditions, and we've taken great care in how to operate them," said JPL roboticist Vandi Tompkins, one of Opportunity's former operators. "Someday, some essential part will go that stops it. It's going to happen. But we try our best to push that as far as out as we can." Rover on a mission to Mars NASA rover set to touch down on Mars The Number: "Curiosity" Mars landing NASA's search for signs of life on Mars Even after all these years, "You still see a lot of excitement" at Opportunity's control center at JPL," Tompkins said. NASA spent $800 million to launch Opportunity and its sister rover, Spirit. The twin craft lifted off from Cape Canaveral in June 2003 aboard separate Delta II rockets and landed successfully the following January, bouncing onto the surface inside a cocoon of air bags. The roughly 5-foot-long, 380-pound rovers were loaded with a variety of cameras and instruments used to analyze martian rocks and soil, and their findings have helped convince NASA that Mars once had water on its surface. 'Crazy' Mars landing coming NASA lost contact with Spirit in 2010 and wrote off the rover in May 2011, but Opportunity kept on going. Among its findings was a vein of the mineral gypsum -- an indication that water once ran across the surface of the Red Planet. And it beamed back its 100,000th picture, a sweeping panorama of the martian surface, in early July. Not that it's been unscathed. It's got a worn "shoulder" joint on its robotic arm, making some operations difficult. It was stuck in a sand dune for nearly two months in mid-2005. But it has had unexpected luck, as well. "The solar panels were expected to collect a lot of dust, and they did," Tompkins said. "But we've had winds that have cleaned the solar panels occasionally, and that has given it a new lease on life." Tompkins is now working on the much-larger Curiosity. Designers built the 2,000-pound craft with lessons from Spirit and Opportunity in mind, including a longer, more advanced robot arm, a hammer drill that can crack apart rocks and a laser that reduces rock to a hot plasma, allowing an on-board spectrograph to determine its composition. Opportunity's neighborhood is known as the Meridiani Planum, a sandy desert located a few degrees south and west of the martian equator and its prime meridian. The site is nearly halfway around the planet from Spirit's location, and from where Curiosity is expected to touch down at 1:31 a.m. Monday ET. It can run more than 100 meters (325 feet) in a day, but it's not exactly a speed demon: Opportunity tops out at about 2 inches a second. But it's also capable of climbing up to 30-degree slopes. Building an out-of-this-world menu for Mars Tompkins says the goal for operators is "pushing the limits and keeping it safe." "The fact that the rovers have lasted also has to do with how carefully you operate them," she said. The average distance between the Earth and Mars is about 225 million miles, but it varies widely during the year as both planets orbit the sun. When they're the farthest apart -- about 400 million miles -- a radio signal from NASA takes more than half an hour to reach the rovers. That means controllers have to pre-program Opportunity's daily movements, working from a three-dimensional model of the surrounding terrain, Tompkins said. JPL transmits the plan to the rover, which carries out the program and beams the data back to Earth via two satellites now circling the Red Planet, the Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. That means the programs have to be completed by the time those satellites are in range, adding one more wrinkle to controllers' calculations. "Imagine planning your drive from your home to your office," she said. "Even though you know that route truly well and there's no traffic, imagine having to pre-think all those options. Then imagine it's raining." source:
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| skibboy | 6 Aug 2012, 01:30 AM Post #5 |
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Rover Curiosity just hours from Mars By Elizabeth Landau, CNN August 6, 2012 -- Updated 0012 GMT (CNN) -- Humanity's curiosity about Mars has led to an exciting event: the dramatic landing of an SUV-sized rover, set for 1:31 a.m. ET Monday. NASA's $2.6 billion rover, Curiosity, will make its dramatic entrance into Martian territory in a spectacle popularly known as the "seven minutes of terror." This jaw-dropping landing process, involving a sky crane and the world's largest supersonic parachute, allows the spacecraft carrying Curiosity to target the landing area that scientists have meticulously chosen. The spacecraft is "healthy and right on course," according to the latest update from NASA. Curiosity has been traveling away from Earth since November 26. The vehicle, which will be controlled from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has a full suite of sophisticated tools for exploring Mars. They include 17 cameras, a laser that can survey the composition of rocks from a distance and instruments that can analyze samples from soil or rocks. If all goes according to plan, Curiosity's first stop will be Gale Crater, which might have once contained a lake. After least a year, the rover will arrive at Mount Sharp, in the center of the crater. The rover will drive up the mountain examining layers of sediment. This process is like looking at a historical record because each layer represents an era of the planet's history, scientists say. The phenomenon of sedimentary layers is remarkably similar to what is seen on Earth, in California's Death Valley or in Montana's Glacier National Park, says John Grotzinger, chief scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory mission. Rocks and minerals found on Earth are different than on Mars, but the idea of a mountain made of layers is familiar to scientists. Unlike on Earth, however, Mars has no plate tectonics, so the Martian layers are flat and not disrupted as they would be on Earth. That also means that Mount Sharp was formed in a different way than how mountains are created on Earth -- no one knows how. In these layers, scientists are looking for organic molecules, which are necessary to create life. But even if Curiosity finds them, that's not proof that life existed -- after all, these molecules are found in bus exhaust and meteorites, too, says Steve Squyres, part of the Mars Science Laboratory science team. If there aren't any organics, that may suggest there's something on the planet destroying these molecules, says James Wray, assistant professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and collaborator on the Curiosity science team. But if Curiosity detects them, Wray said, that might help scientists move from asking "was Mars ever habitable" to "did Mars actually host life?" Liquid water is not something scientists expect to be apparent on Mars because the planet is so cold and dry, Squyres said. If the planet does harbor liquid water today, it would have to be deep below the surface, perhaps peeking out in a few special places, but not likely to be seen by Curiosity, Squyres said. Rover to search for clues to life on Mars It's hard to know how long ago liquid water would have been there because there's no mechanism to date the rocks that rovers find on Mars, Squyres said. Evidence from the spacecraft NASA has sent to Mars so far suggests that the "warm and wet" period on Mars lasted for the first billion years of the planet's history. "In order create life, you need both the right environmental conditions -- which includes liquid water -- and you need the building blocks from which life is built, which includes organics," Squyres said. The Mars Science Laboratory is a precursor mission to sharper technology that could do life detection, Grotzinger said. There aren't specific molecules that scientists are looking for with Curiosity. The attitude is: "Let's go to an interesting place with good tools and find out what's there," Squyres said.NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was swarming with media this past week as scientists and journalists prepared for signs of the rover's landing. Squyres and a colleague told each other Thursday they were both feeling "full of hope and optimism." Sunday happens to be the 82nd birthday of former NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong. It's hoped the birthday will be auspicious for the landing, NASA's John Grunsfeld said in a news conference. Curiosity is supposed to last for two years on Mars, but it may operate longer -- after all, Spirit and Opportunity, which arrived on Mars in 2004, were each only supposed to last 90 Martian days. Spirit stopped communicating with NASA in 2010 after getting stuck in sand, and Opportunity is still going. "You take what Mars gives you," said Squyres, also the lead scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, which includes Spirit and Opportunity. "If we knew what we were going to find, it wouldn't this much fun." source:
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| skibboy | 6 Aug 2012, 03:13 AM Post #6 |
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Mars rover to land in giant crater 05/08/2012 - 10:10:25 ![]() The latest Mars destination is a giant crater near the equator with an odd feature: a mountain rising from the crater floor. Gale Crater was gouged by a meteor impact more than three billion years ago. Over time, scientists believe sediments filled in the 96-mile-wide crater and winds sculpted the three-mile-high mountain, called Mount Sharp. Mount Sharp’s stack of rock layers can be read like pages in a storybook with older deposits at the base and more recent material the higher you go, providing a record of Mars history through time. Images from space reveal signs of water in the lower layers of the mountain, including mineral signatures of clays and sulphate salts, which form in the presence of water. Life as we know it needs more than just water -it also needs nutrients and energy. During its two-year mission, the Nasa rover Curiosity will trek to the mountain’s lower flanks in search of the carbon-based building blocks of life. source:
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