MSSS Delivers Last Two MSL Cameras

Officials at Malin Space Science Systems, Inc. (MSSS) announce that they have just delivered the last two of four advanced cameras destined for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover. The mission, which is managed by experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, represents the next exploration rover that the American space agency will set on the surface of the Red Planet. The robot is scheduled to be launched in 2011, and is currently under construction.

The two instruments that were just delivered to the JPL are known as the Mast Camera, or Mastcam, and are destined to the most often used cameras aboard the MSL rover, now named Curiosity. The imagers are capable of grabbing color photographs, similar to the ones that commercially-available user cameras can snap. They will not be installed inside the rover per se, but in the robot's remote sensing mast. This will allow experts to tilt and pan them according to their needs, taking either photos of the rover's surroundings or looking further away in the distance.

MSSS also delivered additional devices with the two cameras, including the Digital Electronics Assembly (DEA), the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and Mars Descent Imager (MARDI). The DEA will be in charge of storing, compressing and buffering the images that the two cameras on the mass capture, officials at the San Diego, California-based company say. After being delivered to the NASA lab, the Mastcam underwent an extremely sensitive contamination measurement test, which determined that they could function in the harsh conditions they would be subjected to once deployed on Mars. Their functionality was also tested on March 19.

“The versions of the Mastcams delivered to JPL have fixed focal lengths (34 mm and 100 mm), and relatively small fields of view (15 degrees and 5 degrees). They would be used to build up coverage of the Martian landscape around the rover from a series of small individual images. The two Mastcams were originally proposed to have the identical 15:1 zoom (variable focal length) lenses on each camera [each camera could image from 100 mm focal length (telephoto) down to 6.5 mm focal length (wide angle)]. NASA directed that the development of the zoom lens be abandoned in 2007 as a cost saving measure,” MSSS officials conclude in their press release.