The Most Advanced Mars Rover Ever Designed has Landed on the Superior Planet

The most advanced Mars rover ever designed has landed on the superior planet.

In a show of technological creative thinking, the robotic individual Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a mild landing within a large crater for the foremost formidable dig nonetheless into the superior planet s past.

A chorus of cheers and approval echoed through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration reaction propulsion Laboratory on Sunday night once the foremost advanced heavenly body rover ever designed sent a symbol to Earth. It had survived a torturous plunge through the skinny Mars atmosphere.
“Touchdown confirmed,” aforementioned engineer Allen bird genus. “We re safe on Mars.”

Minutes once touchdown, Curiosity beamed back the primary photos from the surface showing its wheel and its shadow, forged by the afternoon sun. it had been National Aeronautics and Space Administration s seventh landing on Earth s neighbor; several different tries by the U.S. and different countries to nada past, circle or set down on Mars have gone awry.

The arrival was Delawaregree|associate} engineering tour de force, debuting never-before-tried acrobatics packed into “seven minutes of terror” as Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at thirteen,000 mph (20,920.5 kph).

In a Hollywood-style end, cables exquisitely lowered the rover to the bottom at a snail-paced two mph. A video camera was set to capture the foremost dramatic moments which might offer earthlings their initial glimpse of a touchdown on another world.

The extraterrestrial effort injected a much-needed boost to National Aeronautics and Space Administration, that is debating whether or not it will afford another Mars landing this decade. At a budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is that the priciest gamble nonetheless, that scientists hope can pay off with a bonanza of discoveries.

Over ensuing 2 years, Curiosity can drive over to a mountain rising from the crater floor, poke into rocks and lift out rust-tinted soil to envision if the region ever had the proper surroundings for microscopic organisms to thrive. It s the newest chapter within the long-running quest to seek out out whether or not primitive life arose early within the planet s history.

The voyage to Mars took over eight months and spanned 352 million miles (566 million kilometers). The trickiest a part of the journey? The landing. as a result of Curiosity weighs nearly plenty, engineers drummed up a brand new and additional controlled thanks to set the rover down. The last Mars rovers, twins Spirit and chance, were cocooned in air luggage and bounced to a stop in 2004.

The plans for Curiosity needed a series of braking tricks, like those utilized by the ballistic capsule, and a supersonic parachute to slow it down. Next: Ditch the warmth defend used for the fiery descent. And in an exceedingly new twist, engineers came up with the way to lower the rover by cable from a hovering rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords cut and also the rocket stage crashed a distance away.

The nuclear-powered Curiosity, the scale of alittle automotive, is packed with scientific tools, cameras and a observation post. It sports a robotic arm with an influence drill, a optical maser which will zap distant rocks, a chem lab to smell for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to live dangerous radiation on the surface.

It conjointly half-tracked radiation levels throughout the journey to assist National Aeronautics and Space Administration higher perceive the risks astronauts may face on a future manned trip. once many weeks of health checkups, the six-wheel rover may take its initial short drive and flex its robotic arm.

The landing web site close to Mars equator was picked as a result of there ar signs of past water all over, meeting one among the wants for keeps as we all know it. within current of air Crater could be a 3-mile- (5-kilometer-) high mountain, and pictures from house show the bottom seems made in minerals that shaped within the presence of water.

Previous visits to Mars have uncovered ice close to the Martian North Pole and proof that water once flowed once the earth was wetter and toastier not like these days s harsh, frigid desert surroundings.

Curiosity s goal: to scour for basic ingredients essential for keeps together with carbon, nitrogen, element, sulfur and gas. It s not equipped to go looking for living or fossil microorganisms. to urge a definitive answer, a future mission must fly Martian rocks and soil back to Earth to be examined by powerful laboratories.

The mission comes as National Aeronautics and Space Administration retools its Mars exploration strategy. moon-faced with robust economic times, the house agency force out of partnership with the ecu house Agency to land a rock-collecting rover in 2018. The Europeans have since teamed with the Russians as National Aeronautics and Space Administration decides on a brand new roadmap.

Despite Mars name as a ballistic capsule site, humans continue their romance with the earth, lobbing ballistic capsule in search of clues regarding its early history. Out of over 3 dozen tries flybys, orbiters and landings by the U.S., state, Europe and Japan since the Nineteen Sixties, over [*fr1] have terminated disastrously.

One National Aeronautics and Space Administration rover that defied expectations is chance, that continues to be busy wheeling round the rim of a crater within the Martian hemisphere eight years later.

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Posted by Paracha on August 5, 2012. Filed under Innovation, News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry