14 DAY TRIAL // Officials from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, have recently announced that the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity has less than 100 days to go before it finally reaches its destination. The spacecraft is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in August.
The milestone was reached on April 27, at 1:31 pm EDT (1731 GMT), when the aeroshell carrying Curiosity was about 119 million miles (191 million kilometers) away from the Martian surface.
According to officials at JPL, the spacecraft is traveling at a speed of roughly 13,000 miles (21,000 kilometers) per hour. The team handling the rover says that the latest achievement was reached less than a week after the entire MSL team carried out a weeklong, operational readiness test, ending on April 22.
During this assessment, investigators analyzed all commands and code lines that they would have to upload into the MSL as the spacecraft gets ready to enter the Martian atmosphere. Its aeroshell will have to support the steepest angle of entry of all missions NASA has ever sent to the Red Planet.
JPL is home to a test rover that shares all of Curiosity's specifications, so mission controllers used this machine for their tests. The team in California manages Curiosity for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, at the space agency's Headquarters, in Washington DC.
“Every day is one day closer to the most challenging part of this mission. Landing an SUV-sized vehicle next to the side of a mountain 85 million miles from home is always stimulating,” JPL MSL Project Manager, Pete Theisinger, says.
“Our engineering and science teams continue their preparations for that big day and the surface operations to follow,” the expert goes on to say. At this point, the mission is scheduled to land in the evening of August 5 (PDT) / August 6 (UTC), 2012.
The spacecraft was launched to space aboard an Atlas V delivery system, from Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41), at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), in Florida. Takeoff occurred on November 26, 2011, at 1502 UTC.
The aeroshell carrying Curiosity has been en route since that time. Experts have already turned on a radiation monitoring instrument on the spacecraft, and are currently investigating all other systems.
“Our test rover has a central computer identical to Curiosity's currently on its way to Mars. We ran all our commands through it and watched to make sure it drove, took pictures and collected samples as expected by the mission planners,” JPL MSL engineering test leader, Eric Aguilar, said.
“It was a great test and gave us a lot of confidence moving forward,” the expert concluded.