It was celebration time at NASA on August 5^, 2012. After completing an 8 month journey from earth, a $2.5 billion robotic vehicle safely landed “Curiosity” – a rover the size of a car, with several equipment on board to explore planet Mars. This mission is very prestigious for NASA and has been several decades in the making. It has been compared with the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

What is the significance for NASA, the purpose of this mission and buzz about it? Lets find out.

 

Mission Curiosity

The name says it all… This space mission was launched to quench the curiosity of scientists working in NASA and many others around the world about the question “Is there life on Mars”. Curiosity is essentially a science lab with the mission to search for evidence that the Red Planet might once have hosted life.

NASA has successfully launched 3 rovers in the past. However this mission is very special as the rover is nearly 10 times the size of the other Martian rovers. It carries the most advanced scientific gear ever to be used on Mars, including 10 research instruments and 17 cameras to survey the landscape and record experiments.

A picture perfect landing

If you thought that landing for a space mission would be like landing a plane, then you have it totally wrong. Nothing is complete until the rover is delivered safely on Martian soil.

It was a miracle of engineering - right from the exit out of Earth’s atmosphere on Nov 26, 2011, to steering it into the Martian atmosphere, to the touch down. The capsule transporting the rover plunged through Martian atmosphere at an angle producing the right aerodynamic lift for a guided entry. Jet thrusters helped the capsule steer itself while burning off most of its fuel in downward descent. Soon a giant supersonic parachute took over to deliver Curiosity over the last mile to the surface of the Red planet on all four wheels. Called the “seven minutes of terror” by NASA, the landing was closely observed by satellites. It was one of the most excruciating processes. At NASA base, everyone had their eyes glued to a screen, each with a different job, to help make the landing a smooth one.

And now the mission begins…

The rover at 9 feet long is presently sitting on the crater rim of Gale Crater, relaying its images and research notes to NASA’s base through radio. The first few images that have come through have already excited the scientists at NASA.

Curiosity was certainly a do-or-die mission for NASA given the breadth of the mission and the spectacular costs involved. The successful landing of Curiosity could not have been timelier for NASA already beset by budgetary constraints.

Over the next two years Curiosity will explore Gale Crater and Mount Sharp analyzing rocks along the path for signs of food, carbon and water – the building blocks of life on Earth powered by nuclear fuel. This mission has certainly opened up new vistas for human space exploration and maybe manned missions to Mars in decades to come. This is really space history in the making...

Courtesy: NASA