Mars Rover FAQs: What’s Next - daviescritaiment1967
The fact that the Mars rover "Wonder" didn't crash during its 7-minute landing place successiveness Sunday night PDT is, in itself, immense.
The agency's largest and most complex wanderer so out-of-the-way landed safely on the red planet and will drop the next cardinal years investigation it for signs of microbial life.
The unflawed, albeit complicated, landing was inveterate Sunday at 10:32 p.m. PDT later on Curiosity set polish near the foot of a loads three miles tall indoors Red Planet' 96-mile-wide Gale Volcanic crater.
How is the Rover Stocked to Investigate Mars?
Peculiarity is equipped with 10 science instruments that, conjunctive, own a total mass 15 times larger than science payloads on the previous Mars rovers Spirit and Chance. Some of the high-tech apparatuses are the first of their considerate on Red Planet, such A a tool that backside train the elemental composition of rocks away inflammation a vaporizing laser at them from a distance.
Curiosity's robotic arm will drill into, scoop, screen, tract stunned, and analyze samples of the planet's aerofoil. NASA says its route observations have identified clay and sulphate minerals in the frown layers, indicating the planet, at incomparable time, had a wet history.
The scouter's power source is a atomic electric generator that produces electricity from the heat of plutonium-238's decay. Longer-living and more reliable than solar power, the thermonuclear generator tail provide Curiosity with power for at any rate a full year on Mars—687 days on Earth—and pumps warm fluids through the scouter to keep it at the right operative temperatures.
What Is Curiosity Seeing?
It took communication signals 14 minutes after landing place to hand Earth from Mars via a relay from NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter to the Capital of Australia, Australia, antenna station of NASA's Large Space Meshing.
Two minutes later, the archetypal photo from Curiosity popped onto video screens at the California Institute of Applied science's Jet Propulsion Science lab (JPL) in Pasadena, Kaliph., where the NASA mission is managed.
The grainy, miserable-resolution image showed one of the rover's wheels and the Superior planet horizon. A few minutes late the Curiosity began to transmit higher-firmness images back to Earth.
"Curiosity's landing site is beginning to inherit focus," said Privy Grotzinger, jut out manager of NASA's Mars Research laboratory mission, in an announcement touting a black-and-white, 512-pixel aside 512-pixel image, taken by Curiosity's buttocks-left Hazcam two hours after Curio's landing place.
"In the image, we are looking to the northwest. What you see on the horizon is the lip of Gale Crater. In the foreground, you can see a puzzle field.
The enquiry is: where does this get come from? It is the maiden of what bequeath make up many scientific questions to come from our new domestic connected Mars."
In a news group discussion Mon, engineers and scientists heading the mission showed off some of the images coming in from Curiosity, also as those from the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which was able-bodied to enamor a photo of Curiosity parachuting toward the surface of Mars.
What's Next for the Rover?
In its first week on Mars, Rarity will deploy its main transmitting aerial, lift a mast equipped with cameras, the rock-vaporizing optical maser and other tools, and take its first wide photograph.
But now that the incredible hurdle of landing on Mars is out of the way, NASA isn't rushing the missionary station Scientists will initially spend weeks inspecting the Curiosity as well as mapping tabu its future routes in front setting off on the premiere drive. The wanderer North Korean won't scoop its first sample of soil until at least mid-September, and information technology will cost October or November before it prototypic drills into rock.
Why Is the Landing a Big Deal?
The one-net ton rover and its spacecraft plummeted into the Martian atmosphere hustling at a blistering 13,000 mph.
Withstanding 65,000 lbs. of force, its huge supersonic parachute slowed Curiosity's decent to about 200 mph, after which the ballistic capsule deployed a kind of hovercraft with retrorockets that further slowed Curiosity to about 0.75 meters per second and softly down it down to the satellite's surface via 25-pes-long cables.
Subsequently waiting 1.5 seconds to make foreordained the rover was on the ground, the "sky-stretch out" system activated small explosives on the cables to set the space vehicle discharge from the bird of passage so it could fly away for a smash landing.
How Can I Keep Tabs on What's Happening connected Mars?
NASA has set up plenty of ways for people to keep track of the Curiosity.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Television set is a fantastic resource for images, videos, blogs, podcasts and more. It's also the place where you fanny picke upcoming press conferences and news updates—the next ones are regular for 4 p.m. PDT Aug. 6 and 10 a.m. PDT happening Aug. 7 and on Aug. 8.
For yet more information and absolutely everything you'd want to make love, visit NASA's Mars Mission page+. You can also espouse along on Chitter and Facebook.
And to get Mars news, images and more on your smartphone operating room tablet, download NASA's Be a Martian app for Android, iPhone and Windows Telephone.
Keep up Christina on Twitter and Google+ for even more tech news and commentary and accompany Today@PCWorld on Chirrup, too.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/460459/mars_rover_faqs_what_s_next.html
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