New Mars Mission Set to Lunch Saturday

Hard at work, white-clad, surgically-masked men and women move with purpose as they inspect machinery and mark things down on clipboards. These technicians are employees at JPL, and are working on the final touches for the space agency’s next mission to Mars. This mission is dubbed the Mars Science Laboratory, and the rover in the middle of it is a car-sized robot called Curiosity.

The Curiosity Rover

The Mars Science Laboratory runs on a fat budget of $2.5 billion and is on schedule to launch November 26 and have Curiosity on the surface of Mars in August 2012. The robot’s main mission will be to figure out if Mars is, or ever has been, capable of supporting microbial life. Right now, Curiosity sits near the far wall in the laboratory; it lies on its back with its six wheels removed. Technicians are fine-tuning its insides. More specifically, they’re reworking some of its avionics and cabling.

Along the lab’s back wall, sits MSL’s cruise stage. The ring-shaped structure is around 13 feet wide and will send Curiosity and its parts through space to Mars, engaging after the mission’s Atlas 5 rocket leaves off. The lab’s workers are fully garbed and wearing hospital masks to reduce the chances that someone will pass a germ or microbe to MSL.

Somewhere near the cruise stage, sits the entry-descent-landing system. This is one of the most interesting pieces of technology dealing with the mission. It’s a rocket-powered sky crane that will lower Curiosity to the Martian surface on cables while hovering in mid-air.

Project manager Peter Theisinger is happy with the work that his team has been doing. "We're pretty confident that this will work," he says. "We've done everything that we know how to do" to prepare it. Curiosity is a large, clunky rover that will enable scientists to learn much more about the Red Planet’s environment. Curiosity weighs in at around 2,000 pounds, compared to only 375 pounds for its twin predecessors: Spirit and Opportunity.

Spirit and Opportunity set foot on Mars in January 2004 to search for evidence of past water on Mars. They ended up finding a lot of it. Curiosity will take the mission one step further, determining whether the Martian landscape is suitable for habitability.

The rover will utilize ten different instruments to complete its mission, which will include analyzing the details of certain rock and looking for organic molecules.

Digging Deep

Curiosity sports a five-jointed, 7-foot robot arm, which alone weighs around half as much as Spirit or Opportunity. This arm will help recover rock samples and has a drill capable of digging 2 inches into Martian rock to do just that.

"For geologists that study rocks, there's nothing better than getting inside," MSL deputy project scientist Joy Crisp comments.

The team recently did some more work on the rover’s drill sensor, which lets the rover know how hard it’s pressing on the drill. If all goes well in the mission, then Curiosity will give us a lot more information on the Red Planet.

NASA Photo by : NASA