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Posts Tagged ‘curiosity rover’

Mission scientists could recommend the rover climb a three-mile-high mound

Both sites could be boons for Mars research. The mound-boasting crater, known as the Gale Crater, contains things that require water to form, like clays and certain sulphates. And because the mound is in a crater, it’s kind of like a trap for sediments. Eberswalde, the other crater, also appears to be full of clays that were dumped there by a river that once flowed into it.

But at this point, it seems that Eberswalde is more of a gamble. If the sediments there turn out to be nothing more than simple rocks, the mission could be largely a failure from a scientific standpoint. Moreover, Eberswalde is further from the Martian equator, and hence colder. That means Curiosity would need additional heating to function there, and that could erode its life expectancy.

Does that make Gale a lock? Not exactly, but it would make for one interesting mission and one unlike any other ever undertaken by rovers on the Red Planet. The processes that created the mound in Gale are also unclear, but researchers are pretty sure that both clays and sulphates are present there, making it the only site among the final four to have both materials potentially present. And let’s not forget, a trip to Gale isn’t just a rover mission. It’s a mountaineering mission.

The idea is for Curiosity to land near the mound, then drive up its surface, sampling and analyzing on its way up. This should show the way the planet’s geology and hydrology changed over time. It could also yield organic material, if indeed there is any there. Mission scientists think Curiosity could cover at least the first thousand feet or so in its design lifetime.

But Opportunity is still functioning a full seven years after its three-month mission expired. Which means if Curiosity is half as hardy, it could climb a mile, or even two, before running out of steam. We’ve got a lot of great pics of the Martian surface as seen from the ground, but image the vistas from atop the Gale mound.

Of course, NASA doesn’t have to select either of these potential sites. The final decision is up to NASA brass and the actual Curiosity mission team. That final decision is expected in July.

[New Scientist, Inside Science]

The Mars Science Laboratory is supposed to launch in a window between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the alignment between Earth and Mars is the most favorable for an interplanetary trip. But as it stands now, the MSL team won’t finish all their work before launch unless they get more money, according to an internal audit prepared by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin.

“The project may have insufficient funds to complete all currently identified tasks prior to launch and may therefore be forced to reduce capabilities, delay the launch for 2 years, or cancel the mission,” he wrote.

If the mission is delayed, NASA will have to spend at least $570 million to adjust mission plans to account for a new planetary alignment, not to mention the advent of the Martian summer. A Martian year is almost double the length of an Earth year, so if MSL lands in late 2013 instead of this fall, it will be just in time for a warming Martian atmosphere to stir up dust storms.

This won’t be as problematic for Curiosity as it was for Spirit and Opportunity, because the new rover is nuclear-powered rather than solar-powered. But still, dust storms could interrupt its sensitive instruments, as well as its ability to communicate with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Deep Space Network on Earth.

The rover’s life cycle costs are already expected to top a whopping $2.5 billion, partly because it is so huge and so complex. Curiosity is four times as heavy as Spirit and Opportunity, and it contains 10 sensitive science instruments designed to look for signs of Martian life. It is designed to land using a complicated sky-crane tether system, the most complicated extraterrestrial landing maneuver NASA has ever attempted.

Launch was already delayed once — the rover was initially supposed to launch between September and October 2009, but several instruments were delivered late and NASA had to move its window back two years. Extra infusions of cash, most recently $71 million in December 2010, have kept the project humming along, but there are apparently still several issues — as of February, there were still 1,200 reports of problems and failures that could cause a delay, including contamination issues with the rover’s soil analysis instruments, and delays in flight software and fault protection systems.

The good news is that the rover is fully built, according to the audit. But apparently the work is far from over.

[NASA, via Space.com]

Check out this amazing new animation of NASA’s new Mars rover, the car-sized Mars Science Laboratory, on its harrowing journey to the red planet.

The rover, also called Curiosity, is too big to land bouncing along airbags a la its predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity. And Mars doesn’t have enough atmosphere for a parachute to slow it sufficiently. So engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory came up with this hybrid approach, involving a rocket-slowed descent and a “sky crane.”

Curiosity will launch this fall and spend the next eight months traveling to Mars. It will enter the Martian atmosphere careening at 13,000 miles per hour, where its Apollo-esque heat shield will protect it from burning up. A parachute slows it down a bit before the rocket-powered descent stage. Then the sky crane lowers the rover, something that has never been done before .... just watch the super-realistic animation below.

Spirit and Opportunity were bouncing around like glorified beach balls when they landed, which was somewhat terrifying for any Mars enthusiast, let alone the rover teams at NASA and affiliated institutions. But a sky crane? It's hard to imagine the tension. Here's hoping it all goes as smoothly as the video.

[via IEEE]

Mass spectrometry is an old space standby--the Mars Science Laboratory, launching in November, will host spectrometry instruments as part of its science suite--used largely to identify the composition of soil and rock on the Martian surface. Usually it is gathered by a scoop or a robot arm, deposited into a special chamber where it is prepared and vaporized, and then ionized so the stuff of atoms can be separated and identified.

But all this handling of soil and rock samples can taint samples and lead to experimental failures. So JPL scientists went looking for a more hands-off approach to spectrometry. They found it in an “ion funnel” developed at the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The new system can analyze samples without lifting them from the surface. A laser first blasts the sample wherever it sits, creating a plume of ions and molecules. The ion funnel then uses a series of progressively smaller conductive rings to guide the ions into the funnel, basically sucking them into the spectrometer for analysis.

In other words, the rover/instrument never has to get it’s hands dirty, and the sample never has to be moved or touched, creating a much cleaner, more pure sample for analysis. Such an ion funnel scheme not only simplifies the science, but it would cut down on the weight and power of future science instrument arrays, making it easier and--perhaps more importantly--cheaper to launch them into space.

[International Business Times]

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity to its friends, is taking shape inside a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA engineers want the public to see their handiwork as they assemble the most ambitious interplanetary explorer ever designed. Watch it here on Ustream.

We already watched as Curiosity took its first baby steps this summer; now you can follow along live as it is put together, piece by piece. Last week, NASA set up a webcam, albeit without audio, from a viewing gallery above the clean room floor. Viewers can watch as new pieces are added — on Oct. 26, workers attached Curiosity’s 7-foot-long robotic arm.

Every so often, Curiosity engineers will host live web chats to answer questions about the rover and its science instruments, according to JPL. Curiosity is designed to go farther than its predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, and its instruments will hunt for signs of life.

The car-sized rover is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center a little more than a year from now, and it will arrive on Mars in August 2012, according to NASA. Lots more work must be done before that — to that end, bunny-suited engineers start working in the clean room at 8 a.m. Pacific time Monday through Friday.

Sometimes the rover might be in a different area where it can’t be seen, and NASA warns that the webcam might shut off occasionally. But the camera has a pretty wide view, so odds are you'll be able to watch as engineers do who-knows-what.

[Jet Propulsion Laboratory]

The space agency has dozens of missions at any given time, and scientists are always maneuvering some spacecraft into a new orbit or into a new trajectory. But the next two years will see triple the usual amount of activity, NASA says. The second half of 2011 will be as busy, space-wise, as entire decades of the space age, according to Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science director.

October kicks off the special year as the EPOXI satellite pays a visit to yet another comet. Then in November, astrobiologists will launch the fantastically named O/OREOS mission, a shoebox-sized satellite designed to test the durability of life in space. It stands for "Organism/ORganic Exposure to Orbital Stresses" and will harbor a group of molecules and microbes and expose them to solar and cosmic radiation, just to see what happens. Scientists have found organic molecules in interstellar space, so NASA would like to know more about how they survive.

In an added bonus, a small solar sail will hitch a ride on O/OREOS and unfurl in Earth orbit. The NanoSail-D will occasionally reflect a sunbeam back to Earth, causing the first “solar sail flares,” NASA says. NASA has had some huge success with hitchhiker satellites — most notably LCROSS, which confirmed the presence of lots of lunar water.

Other milestones include a new spacecraft’s arrival at Venus; the launch of a solar-powered Jupiter probe; a moon-mapping mission; and more.

“History will remember the period Oct. 2010 through Aug. 2012 as a golden age of planetary exploration,” Green said.

Check out our gallery of some of the upcoming missions.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a big week last week, mounting the Remote Sensing Mast and an array of navigation and sensing cameras on their latest Mars rover. Then on Friday Curiosity took its first drive, traveling about three feet back and forth on its brand new 20-inch aluminum wheels.

To the applause of cleanroom-clad NASA engineers, Curiosity crawled along the floor of a lab at JPL while being controlled remotely by wire, rather than by the software that will direct the rover’s movement on Mars. But as a milestone it’s fairly significant. Just a few weeks ago, Curiosity looked like spare parts; today it is the size of a small SUV – far larger than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers already on Mars – and looks the part of a next-gen space exploration vehicle.

But the best is yet to come. While Curiosity is now outfitted with two navigation chams, two mast cameras and a laser chemistry camera, it will soon enough be augmented with its principal geology tool: a 6-foot robotic arm sporting a powerful jackhammer drill and a microscope.

If the schedule holds up, Curiosity should launch next year and arrive on Mars in August 2012. From there, it will explore the landscape for a suitable landing site for future missions while collecting and analyzing rock samples that should shed more light on the planet’s geological history.

See Curiosity go in the video below.

[MSNBC via Discovery]