From CBS News :
Mars rover Curiosity marks new future of space program
(CBS/AP) PASADENA, Calif. - In a show of technological wizardry, the
robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars,
steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most
ambitious dig yet into the Red Planet's past.
Cheers and
applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday
after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had
survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.
"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."
The
extraterrestrial feat injected a much-needed boost to NASA, which is
debating whether it can afford another Mars landing this decade. At a
budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is the priciest gamble yet, which
scientists and government officials hope will pay off with a bonanza of
discoveries.
"We are the only country that has ever done
anything like this," boasted John Holdren, the senior advisor to
President Obama on science and technology issues, who was in the JPL
control room as Curiosity touched down. "Many new technologies had to
work in perfect synchronization."
President Obama called the landing "an unprecedented feat of
technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the
future." In a statement, he added that the landing "parallels" the new
path of partnering with American companies to send more astronauts into
space on American spacecrafts. The plan will hopefully save taxpayer
dollars while still allowing NASA to do the innovative research they
have always done.
Minutes after the landing signal
reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PT, Curiosity beamed back the first
black-and-white pictures from inside the crater showing its wheel and
its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.
"We landed in a
nice flat spot. Beautiful, really beautiful," said engineer Adam
Steltzner, who led the team that devised the tricky landing routine.
It
was NASA's seventh landing on Earth's neighbor; many other attempts by
the U.S. and other countries to zip past, circle or set down on Mars
have gone awry.
The arrival was an engineering tour de force, debuting
never-before-tried acrobatics packed into "seven minutes of terror" as
Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph.
"We're
about to land a rover that is 10 times heavier than (earlier rovers)
with 15 times the payload," Doug McCuistion, director of Mars
exploration at NASA Headquarters, told reporters in the hours before
touchdown. "Tonight's the Super Bowl of planetary exploration, one yard
line, one play left. We score and win, or we don't score and we don't
win.
In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately
lowered the rover to the ground at a snail-paced 2 mph. A video camera
was set to capture the most dramatic moments - the first glimpse of a
touchdown on another world.
Celebrations by the mission
team were so joyous over the next hour that JPL Director Charles Elachi
had to plead for calm in order to hold a press conference. He compared
the team to athletic teams that go to the Olympics.
"This team came back with the gold," he said.
Over
the next two years, Curiosity will drive over to a mountain rising from
the crater floor, poke into rocks and scoop up rust-tinted soil to see
if the region ever had the right environment for microscopic organisms
to thrive. It's the latest chapter in the long-running quest to find out
whether primitive life arose early in the planet's history.
The
voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million
miles. The trickiest part of the journey? The landing. Because Curiosity
weighs nearly a ton, engineers created a more controlled way to set the
rover down. The last Mars rovers, twins Spirit and Opportunity, were
cocooned in air bags and bounced to a stop in 2004.
Curiosity
relied on a series of braking tricks, similar to those used by the
space shuttle, a heat shield and a supersonic parachute to slow down as
it punched through the atmosphere.
And in a new twist,
engineers came up with a way to lower the rover by cable from a hovering
rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords cut and the rocket
stage crashed a distance away.
The nuclear-powered
Curiosity, the size of a small car, is packed with scientific tools,
cameras and a weather station. It sports a robotic arm with a power
drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab to sniff for
the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to measure dangerous
radiation on the surface.
It also tracked radiation
levels during the journey to help NASA better understand the risks
astronauts could face on a future manned trip.
Over the
next several days, Curiosity was expected to send back the first color
pictures. After several weeks of health checkups, the six-wheel rover
could take its first short drive and flex its robotic arm.
The
landing site near Mars' equator was picked because there are signs of
past water everywhere, meeting one of the requirements for life as we
know it. Inside Gale Crater is a 3-mile-high mountain, and images from
space show the base appears rich in minerals that formed in the presence
of water.
Previous trips to Mars have uncovered ice
near the Martian north pole and evidence that water once flowed when the
planet was wetter and toastier unlike today's harsh, frigid desert
environment.
Curiosity's goal: to scour for basic
ingredients essential for life including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous,
sulfur and oxygen. It's not equipped to search for living or fossil
microorganisms. To get a definitive answer, a future mission needs to
fly Martian rocks and soil back to Earth to be examined by powerful
laboratories.
The mission comes as NASA retools its Mars
exploration strategy. Faced with tough economic times, the space agency
pulled out of partnership with the European Space Agency to land a
rock-collecting rover in 2018. The Europeans have since teamed with the
Russians as NASA decides on a new roadmap.
Despite Mars'
reputation as a spacecraft graveyard, humans continue their love affair
with the planet, lobbing spacecraft in search of clues about its early
history. Out of more than three dozen attempts - flybys, orbiters and
landings - by the U.S., Soviet Union, Europe and Japan since the 1960s,
more than half have ended disastrously.
One NASA rover
that defied expectations is Opportunity, which is still busy wheeling
around the rim of a crater in the Martian southern hemisphere eight
years later.
