14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes to landing the heaviest, most complex piece of hardware ever sent to another planet, nothing can be left to chance. Experts managing the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and its rover, Curiosity, are well aware of that, and they are currently making final preparations for landing.
This is scheduled to occur precisely 20 days from now (July 17), at the foot of Mount Sharp, inside Gale Crater. The entire MSL assembly weighs around 1 ton, and is about the size of the Mini Cooper.
Undoubtedly, it is the heaviest rover ever deployed, and also the most challenging vehicle to deposit on the surface of the Red Planet since planetary exploration began. Curiosity also took around $2.5 billion and 8 years to put together.
After being launched on November 26, 2011, aboard an Atlas V delivery system, the MSL spacecraft was put on a course towards Mars, but not aimed directly at the planet. A series of course adjustments were subsequently carried out, all of them successfully.
Now, the vehicle is less than 3 weeks away from its destination, after having traveled for 234 days. According to its designers, the spacecraft features a large number of new technologies and landing methods, many of which have never been tested in the field before.
“The Curiosity landing is the hardest NASA mission ever attempted in the history of robotic planetary exploration,” explains the associate administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld. He is based at the agency's Headquarters, in Washington DC.
“While the challenge is great, the team's skill and determination give me high confidence in a successful landing,” he goes on to say, adding that the landing system used by the MSL – the Sky Crane – may prove essential for manned explorations of the Red Planet.
Curiosity is scheduled to be deployed on the surface of Mars at 0531 GMT, on August 6 (10:31 pm PDT, August 5). Before the actual landing, mission managers will have to go through the “7 minutes of terror,” during which time contact with the spacecraft will be lost, as it enters the atmosphere.
“Those seven minutes are the most challenging part of this entire mission. For the landing to succeed, hundreds of events will need to go right, many with split-second timing and all controlled autonomously by the spacecraft,” JPL MSL project manager, Pete Theisinger, adds.
“We've done all we can think of to succeed. We expect to get Curiosity safely onto the ground, but there is no guarantee. The risks are real,” he concludes.