Post date: Aug 04, 2012 8:19:27 PM
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (AUGUST 4, 2012) (NASA TV) - By the time the robotic Mars laboratory dubbed Curiosity streaks into the thin Martian atmosphere at hypersonic speed on Sunday(August 5)night, the spacecraft will be in charge of its own seven-minute final approach to the surface of the Red Planet.
NASA gets ready for Mars laboratory Curiosity's landing on the Red Planet.
"Events over the last few days on the spacecraft have been nominal and quiet. As nominal and quiet as we could hope for. The spacecraft has been under the autonomous control of the E-D-L (entry, descent, and landing) sequence since Monday evening and has been executing it's actions as planned," said Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mission Manager Arthur Amador during a news conference on Saturday(August 4).With a 14-minute delay in the time it takes for radio waves from Earth to reach Mars 154 million miles (248 million km) away, NASA engineers will already have given Curiosity the last commands of its eight-month voyage through space.
At that point, the mission control team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles will have little more to do than anxiously track the spacecraft's progress - and wait.
"The big difference between normal surface operations and what we're doing now is really the uncertainty. There's just lost of things that are different about this vehicle on the surface," said JPL's Richard Cook, who is overseeing communications with the spacecraft, "there's a lot of uncertainty of how quickly we'll be able to do things."
Curiosity's fate will then hinge on the performance of its pre-programmed directions, a new self-guided flight system and a complex, seemingly far-fetched landing sequence that includes a giant parachute and a never-before-used, jet-powered "sky crane" that must descend to the right spot over the planet, lower Curiosity to the ground on a tether, cut the cords and fly away.
No wonder NASA half-jokingly says "it gets scarier every day."
"If we're not successful, we're going to learn, we're going to learn from this. We've learned in the past and we've recovered from it. We'll pick ourselves up, we'll dust ourselves off, we'll look at ourselves and do something again, we'll do it again. This will not be the end," said NASA's Mars Exploration Program Director Doug McCuistion.
While a great deal of groundbreaking technology has gone into delivering the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover to Mars, the thrust of the $2.5 billion project is the two-year scientific mission that follows.
Curiosity, billed as the first full-fledged analytical laboratory on wheels ever sent to another world, is designed primarily to search for evidence that Mars may have once harbored conditions favorable to microbial life.