14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, January 11, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity completed its first course-correction maneuver in a series that will eventually ensure it reaches the Red Planet. The purpose of these maneuvers is to separate the Atlas V upper stage from the vehicle carrying Curiosity.
The upper stage was not thoroughly disinfected as the aeroshell around the rover was, so the risk of cross-contamination is rather large. The spacecraft was therefore set on a wrong course towards Mars. After separation, Curiosity is slowly being put back on track.
The actual maneuver began at 6 pm EST (2300 GMT), and took about three hours to complete. Curiosity needs to travel about 352 million mile (567 million kilometers) until it reaches its destination, and the maneuver it carried out yesterday was the most important of its entire journey.
“I just left a group of happy flight team controllers in our mission control. We took a big step towards our encounter with Gale crater on Mars,” Space quotes Arthur Amador as saying. He is the rover cruise mission manager at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.