PASADENA, Calif. — With the rover
Curiosity’s dramatic landing accomplished, testing of its communication and
power systems began Monday as NASA worked to understand exactly where its
vehicle had landed and how it withstood its 354 million-mile journey to Mars.
NASA scientists believe the one-ton rover
landed on bedrock in the 3.5 billion-year-old Gale Crater and is facing the
distant crater wall, believed to be about three miles high. A mountain in the
crater will be the focus of the mission because its exposed rock faces are
expected to provide clues about the area’s physical history and whether life’s
building blocks ever existed there.
In the aftermath of the high-precision
landing, space-exploration advocates embraced Curiosity as proof of American
ambition and prowess.
“If anybody has been harboring doubts about the status of U.S.
leadership in space, well, there’s a one-ton, automobile-size piece of American
ingenuity, and it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now,” presidential
science adviser John P. Holdren said at a news conference after the landing.
Curiosity, called “the mission of the
decade” by NASA officials, will search for the building blocks of
extraterrestrial life and investigate how Mars turned from a wet and warm
planet into a dry and cold one. The sophisticated instruments used on the
mission could hasten the day when humans fly to Mars.
And the two-year mission could draw
interest for years, inspiring young people to go into science the way the
Apollo moon program did in the 1960s and 1970s, officials said.
“Experiencing that remarkably complex but perfect landing, and then
watching the rover in the months ahead, can’t help but excite young people,”
said Jean-Lou Chameau, president of the California Institute of Technology,
which operates NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is managing the mission.
President Obama hailed the landing as “an
unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride
far into the future. It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for
our unique blend of ingenuity and determination.”
There have been seven successful landings
on Mars, all by NASA, but Curiosity is by far the most technically
sophisticated — and expensive. Its $2.5 billion price tag has drawn some
criticism.
But after nailing the most difficult
planetary landing ever, NASA and Obama administration officials appear to
believe the dynamic has changed. After the landing, NASA Administrator Charles
Bolden told a cheering crowd that the mission as a whole cost the equivalent of
a single movie ticket for everyone in the United States. “And this is a movie I
think people want to see,” he said.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) called
the first images “breathtaking.”
“The soft landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars is a testament to
NASA’s engineering superiority,” she said. “More importantly, it serves as the
most recent and best example of why it is so important for us to continue to
invest in deep-space exploration. By committing to expand the horizons of
exploration, we guarantee new discoveries and new applications from all we
learn.”
The landing could not come at a more
opportune time for NASA, which is facing significant budget cuts. Some of the
largest budget hits are to the Mars and planetary sciences programs, cuts that
many now say could and should be scaled back.
The United States now has two active rovers
on the planet and two orbiters, a high point for the nation’s presence on or
around Mars.
Now that NASA’s rover Curiosity is safe on
the surface of Mars, the robot will start its scientific investigation at Gale
Crater. The roving laboratory is equipped with a full array of instruments
aimed to determine if the Red Planet was ever capable of support ing life.
While the landing provided high drama and a
look at the highest-quality, made-in-America technology and expertise, the
mission has only begun, and soon the scientists will begin their work. More
than 300 of them gathered at JPL for the landing, as anxious as the engineers
about the rover’s fate.
Curiosity’s overall mission is to search
for the building blocks of extraterrestrial life on Mars and to identify
habitats where it may once have flourished. The Gale Crater landing site was
selected because orbiting satellites have determined it was once covered in
water and still shows a large “alluvial fan,” where river water or meltwater
once ran.
In addition, it is known to contain clays
and minerals that can be formed only in water — the kind of terrain that could
house and preserve the carbon-based organic compounds that are essential to
life as we know it.
Curiosity also will be providing images and
videos of a type and quality never seen before. The first photos were primitive
black-and-white fisheye images taken by the hazard cameras at the bottom of the
vehicle, used to look for potentially harmful boulders. But future pictures
will be in high-definition color, and some will be taken from Mount Sharp — the
three-mile-high mountain in the center of the crater that Curiosity will climb
in the months ahead.
The image of Curiosity’s descent was taken
by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In the photo, the Curiosity rover was still
connected to its 51-foot-wide parachute as it descended toward its landing site
at Gale Crater.
“If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we
probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape,” said Sarah Milkovich,
HiRISE investigation scientist at JPL. She said the team had been preparing to
take the photo since March and finally uploaded commands to the satellite only
72 hours prior to the landing.
At a JPL news conference Monday, mission
manager Mike Watkins said “we are a ‘go’ for all plans” for first-day
activities. He described them as “kind of boring,” including system checks to
make sure the rover is fully operational. The first order of business: making
sure communications back to Earth are healthy.
Quite a change after the jubilation and
triumph of the early Monday landing but necessary for the next steps forward.
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