Curiosity thrills with new views of the Red Planet
SCIENTISTS HOPE TO USE MOBILE LAB TO ANALYSE SOIL AND ROCKS
After its first day on Mars, Nasa’s rover on Monday sent back to Earth stunning images of its crater landing site and the mountain it aims to climb in the hunt for signs of life.
The landing of the $2.5 billion (Dh9.1 billion) Mars Science Laboratory and nuclearpowered robot Curiosity late on Sunday opened a new chapter in the history of interplanetary exploration by touching down on the Red Planet.
The one-tonne mobile lab is the largest rover ever sent to Mars, and its high-speed landing was the most daring to date, using a rocket-powered sky crane to lower the six-wheeled vehicle gently to the Martian surface.
Numerous images of the car-sized rover and its alien surroundings have come back to Nasa since the landing occurred at 10.32pm on Sunday on the US West Coast (0532 GMT Monday). New images of the rover’s descent, taken from the vehicle itself, were shown on Nasa television, strung together in a video that depicted the spacecraft’s heat shield deploying and dust kicked up before the rover landed wheels down.
Other black and white images show the rover’s shadow and Mount Sharp in the distance, a mountain it aims to conquer as part of its two-year mission to explore Mars and analyse sediment layers that are up to a billion years old. The images so far tend to be small, but high-resolution images are expected in the next couple of weeks.
Good position
“The spacecraft is oriented northwest-southeast, pointing forward toward Mount Sharp,” said project scientist John Grotzinger.
“This couldn’t have been a better position to land in.”
However, Grotzinger said it may be a year before the rover arrives at the mountain in the centre of the planet’s Gale Crater, as scientists first take a close look at soil and rock samples inside the crater.
“We would never want to just drive across the dunes as the shortest way to go there,” he said.
Initial checks
According to Nasa chief engineer Miguel San Martin, the rover touched down inside the planned landing ellipse that spanned 20 by 6km at the foot of the mountain.
Further data in the coming days will give scientists a better idea of exactly where the rover landed. Initial checks on the instruments on board have also come back positive, Nasa said.
President Barack Obama described the landing as “an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future.”
Scientists do not expect Curiosity to find aliens or living creatures but they hope to use it to analyze soil and rocks for signs the building blocks of life are present and may have supported life in the past.