The Mars Curiosity Rover is still on track to land on the surface of Mars this weekend. Who's a better person to add to the lore than Captain Kirk? Check out William Shatner's narration of the 7 minutes of terror video that I blogged about earlier. The video describes the harrowing 7 minute period when the Rover drops from Mars orbit and attempts to land on the surface.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords
Time's Techland blog has a great piece showing the technology on the Mars Curiosity Rover. I've posted about the 7 minute process for Curiosity to land on Martian soil from orbit. Curiosity is scheduled to land on the red planet on August 6th to commence its mission of looking for signs of life such as water.
The coolest piece of tech that Techland features is the Heat Rejection System, which pumps out heat when it's hot and stores heat when it's cold. Even in my mighty man cave, my computer needs a constant room temperature to run smoothly. On Mars, where the temperature can vary 300 F in a single day, this heat regulation is even more important. Additionally, temperature change can cause metal to expand and contract rapidly, meaning that the rover has to tolerate this variability in the metal throughout the day.
To view the fact sheet for the mission, click here. There's also a lot of Curiosity games on the Xbox Kinect, web, mobile, and tablet devices - check them out here!
NASA previously launched the Curiosity Rover to help further explore the terrain of Mars. It's scheduled to land on August 5th and will begin "a two-year study of whether the landing vicinity ever offered an environment favorable for microbial life."
One of the most important parts is the actual landing sequence when Curiosity will approach from space, enter the Martian atmosphere, descend toward the desired target, and land successfully. This is known as "Seven Minutes of Terror", and is the most painful time for the engineers involved as well as space geeks such as myself. There are plenty of redundant systems on any spacecraft in case there is an electronic failure, but just about everything has to go correct. In honor of "Seven Minutes of Terror", I present "Five Minutes of Funk"
This post on Planetary.org gives a nice summary on the different phases of this sequence, known as EDL (Entry, Descent, Landing). Discovery also has a nice profile, and mentions the following:
Now think about this: the rover weighs — get this — 890 kilograms, nearly a ton. The Mars air is thick enough that engineers have to deal with it, but too thin to bring Curiosity all the way to the surface safely. So they need a heat shield to slow it initially, a parachute to brake even more, and then rocket motors to drop it the rest of the way.
Check out the video below for more details!
