NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory ) has just successfully landed a massive 1-ton rover on the surface of Mars. The rover, approximately the size of a small car has been successfully deployed in one of the greatest accomplishments in years of space and planetary exploration.
NASA’s 1-ton Curiosity rover, the centerpiece of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, has landed on the Martian surface to investigate whether the planet is, or ever was, capable of harboring past or present microbial life.
The rover survived harrowing journey through the Red Planet’s atmosphere — a process that was nicknamed the “seven minutes of terror.”
Discovery Live Blog via Telegraph
The Curiosity landing was the hardest NASA robotic mission ever attempted in the history of exploration of Mars, or any of our robot exploration,” John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “This was risky business.”
Since Curiosity was too large for an airbag-assisted landing, NASA used a complex and unprecedented sky crane system to safely lower the rover onto the surface of the Red Planet. This sequence of events — called entry, descent and landing (EDL) — lasted approximately seven minutes.
“Those seven minutes were the most challenging part of this entire mission,” said Pete Theisinger, MSL project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “For the landing to succeed, hundreds of events needed to go right, many with split-second timing and all controlled autonomously by the spacecraft.”
As Curiosity streaked through the Martian atmosphere, the spacecraft slowed itself from roughly 13,200 mph (about 21,250 kilometers per hour) to zero in only seven minutes. The rocket-powered sky crane, which acts similar to a backpack with three nylon cords attached, will finally helped to control the rover’s descent.
