Rover “Curiosity”

I was wondering how they are going to land the largest heaviest most complex rover ever built, to grace the face of another planet. While the rovers Spirit and Opportunity are the size of a child’s four-wheeler, this rover is the size of an automobile, She is the biggest, most high tech, rover ever built and she is nuclear powered! No more solar panels to get dusty and have power fades. No more tiny wheels and gears that wear out too quickly as with the rover Spirit whose right front wheel wore out and locked up causing NASA to drive it in reverse, dragging it behind the rover.

This new rover is one smart cookie. It can sniff the atmosphere and analyze what it smells, has a laser powerful enough to vaporize rock and then analyze the vapor. It comes with a unique instrument called a APXS (Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer) that can measure the abundance of chemical elements in the dust, soil and rocks. It will also search out organic molecules (the building blocks of life).

The rover is equipped with high definition color cameras and will send back both photos and video. She is one heavy rover, weighing in at 2000 lbs., and costing a whopping 2.5 billion dollars. It is expected to dramatically increase scientific knowledge of the red planet.

But getting this big, beautiful girl to the surface is going to be harrowing, as dropping in at Mars at more than 13,000 miles per hour would be certain disaster. So NASA has come up with a very unique way to land.

With a launch window of November 25 through December 18, 2011 and being launched on the massive Atlas V rocket and ten long months of journey, the rover will arrive at Mars riding inside a cone shaped-capsule with a heat shield cover on its bottom, for its 81-mile journey through Mars’ atmosphere. A parachute will deploy, slowing the capsule to the point that the shield and chute are no longer needed. The capsule will simultaneously release both chute and shield while four rockets fire bringing the capsule to a near hover while cables lower the rover. Upon contact with the surface, the cable will cut from the rover and the cone will then fly off at an angle crashing into Mars surface.

While some scientists shiver at the thought of this complex scenario, NASA says it has proven very reliable in its many tests here on earth.

The rover will be landing at Gale Crater and hopefully soon we will be hearing that it is running around sniffing everything it sees like a little curious puppy, which is fitting for a rover that NASA has named “Curiosity”.