No one seems entirely certain what the future holds for NASA anymore. Opinions vary from the “Obama is going to shut them down” crowd to the “they’ll have humans back in space next year” bunch. For now they’re all about
No one seems entirely certain what the future holds for NASA anymore. Opinions vary from the “Obama is going to shut them down” crowd to the “they’ll have humans back in space next year” bunch. For now they’re all about robots, and over the Thanksgiving weekend they sent a new one to Mars.
On November 26th America’s space agency launched the Mars Science Laboratory. Inside the Atlas V rocket launched from Cape Canaveral 10:02 a.m. EST is a robotic rover named Curiosity. It’s the size of a car. It’s the biggest, most advanced package sent to Mars yet. It even has a laser.
Here’s NASA’s official description of the rover’s mission…
Curiosity’s ambitious science goals are among the mission’s many differences from earlier Mars rovers. It will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover. Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science-instrument payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking the elemental composition of rocks from a distance, and an X-ray diffraction instrument for definitive identification of minerals in powdered samples.
To haul and wield its science payload, Curiosity is twi