NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover Report #7

NASA’s Mars Curios­i­ty Rover Report #7



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A NASA’s Mars Curios­i­ty rover team mem­ber gives an update on devel­op­ments and sta­tus of the plan­e­tary explo­ration mis­sion. The Mars Sci­ence Lab­o­ra­to­ry space­craft deliv­ered Curios­i­ty to its tar­get area on Mars at 1:31:45 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6, which includes the 13.8 min­utes need­ed for con­fir­ma­tion of the touch­down to be radioed to Earth at the speed of light. The rover will con­duct a near­ly two-year prime mis­sion to inves­ti­gate whether the Gale Crater region of Mars ever offered con­di­tions favor­able for micro­bial life.

Curios­i­ty car­ries 10 sci­ence instru­ments with a total mass 15 times as large as the sci­ence pay­loads on NASA’s Mars rovers Spir­it and Oppor­tu­ni­ty. Some of the tools, such as a laser-fir­ing instru­ment for check­ing rocks’ ele­men­tal com­po­si­tion from a dis­tance, are the first of their kind on Mars. Curios­i­ty will use a drill and scoop, which are locat­ed at the end of its robot­ic arm, to gath­er soil and pow­dered sam­ples of rock inte­ri­ors, then sieve and par­cel out these sam­ples into the rover’s ana­lyt­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ry instruments.



#NASAs #Mars #Curios­i­ty #Rover #Report