This Weekend the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft lands the Curiosity rover on Mars. There is information on media coverage on the internet, and lots of information on the mission and hardware here. It is a big deal.
It looks especially big to me, since I worked on the first Mars flyby spacecraft at JPL in the 1960’s. It was called Mariner 4 , was launched in 1964, and successfully gathered data and sent the first detailed photographs of the Martian surface home. These photographs showed that Mars was nothing like we humans thought it would be — no canals, no traces of life, just craters and desolation. I was involved with the mission from the preliminary design through fabrication, testing, , and mission control, and we kept our fingers crossed for nine months during its journey. Nervous making.
I am at least as nervous now, even though I haven’t worked at JPL or on a spacecraft since 1966. This mission is an incredible endeavor. Placing a roving vehicle the size of Curiosity on the Martian surface requires a very large number of things to go right. The Mariner 4 simply flew by the planet and returned its data at a leisurely 8.3 bits per second. Curiosity, the size of a small automobile, is meant to amble around the surface for two years, carrying out a very large amount of scientific experiments and relaying photographs home. In comparison to the Mariner 4, it can communicate directly with earth at 500 bits per second, but can send information to the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter at rates up to 2 megabits per second, and to the Odyssey orbiter at up to 256 kilobits per second, for much more rapid transmission home.
Perhaps I am so nervous because when I was involved in the “space race”, there were many more failures than is now the case. But the technical tricks necessary to get Curiosity down and running are mind blowing. Some indication of this is in the nice little video shown here, narrated by some of the JPL engineers involved
The best of luck, Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity.
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