Post date: Aug 05, 2012 7:34:19 PM
The Mars rover Curiosity streaked into the home stretch of its eight-month voyage on Sunday nearing a make-or-break landing attempt.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (AUGUST 5, 2012) (NASA TV) - : The Mars rover Curiosity, on a quest for signs the Red Planet once hosted the building blocks of life, streaked into the home stretch of its eight-month voyage on Sunday (August 5) nearing a make-or-break landing attempt NASA calls its most challenging ever.
"Tonight's it's the Super Bowl of planet exploration. One yard line, one play left. That play is about twelve hours from now. We score and win," NASA's Mars exploration program director Doug McCuistion said.Curiosity, the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory ever sent to a distant world, is scheduled to touch down inside a vast, ancient impact crater on Sunday at 10:31 p.m. Pacific time (1:31 a.m. EDT on Monday/0531 GMT on Monday).
Mission control engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)near Los Angeles acknowledge that delivering the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered vehicle in one piece is a highly risky proposition, with zero margin for error.
"We're about to land a rover that is ten times heavier than the Spirit or Opportunity with fifteen times the payload. Pretty incredible feat we're about to attempt. So we may not be successful," McCuistion said.
But on the eve of Curiosity's rendezvous with Mars, JPL's team said the spacecraft and its systems were functioning flawlessly, and forecasts called for favorable Martian weather over the landing zone.
After a journey from Earth of more than 350 million miles (567 million km), engineers said they were hopeful the rover, the size of a small sports car, will land precisely as planned near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of Gale Crater in Mars' southern hemisphere.
Facing deep cuts in its science budget and struggling to regain its footing after cancellation of the space shuttle program - NASA's centerpiece for 30 years - the agency has much at stake in the outcome of the $2.5 billion mission.
"If we are successful getting to the ground and we are successful with Odyssey information coming back we are going to have the opportunity for untold discoveries," McCuistion said, "It would be one of the greatest feats in planetary exploration ever not to mention just this decade. I think it shows the leadership the United States has had in the exploration of Mars."
Mars is the chief component of NASA's long-term deep space exploration plans. Curiosity, the space agency's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes, is designed primarily to search for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth may have once have harbored ingredients necessary for microbial life to evolve.