Regardless of displaying indicators of wear and tear and tear, the intrepid spacecraft is about to start an thrilling new chapter in its mission because it scales a Martian mountain.
Ten years in the past at this time, a jetpack lowered NASA’s Curiosity rover onto the Crimson Planet, starting the SUV-sized explorer’s seek for proof that billions of years in the past , Mars had the mandatory situations to assist microscopic life.
Since then, Curiosity has traveled almost 18 miles (29 kilometers) and climbed 2,050 ft (625 meters) exploring Gale Crater and the Mount Sharp foothills inside it. The rover analyzed 41 rock and soil samples, counting on a set of scientific devices to study what they reveal about Earth’s rocky sibling. And that prompted a group of engineers to plot methods to reduce put on and hold the rover rolling: in actual fact, Curiosity’s mission was lately prolonged by three years, permitting it to proceed among the many fleet of astrobiological missions. vital from NASA.
A bounty of science
It has been a busy decade. Curiosity has studied the skies of the Crimson Planet, capturing pictures of vibrant clouds and drifting moons. The rover’s radiation sensor permits scientists to measure the quantity of high-energy radiation future astronauts could be uncovered to on the Martian floor, serving to NASA work out how one can hold them protected.
However most significantly, Curiosity has decided that liquid water together with the chemical substances and vitamins wanted to maintain life have been current for at the least tens of hundreds of thousands of years in Gale Crater. The crater as soon as contained a lake, which has elevated and decreased in measurement over time. Every layer increased up on Mount Sharp serves as a report of a more moderen period of Mars’ surroundings.
Now the intrepid rover is crossing a canyon that marks the transition to a brand new area, which is believed to have fashioned because the water dried up, abandoning salty minerals known as sulphates.
“We see proof of dramatic modifications within the historical Martian local weather,” mentioned Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity mission scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The query now’s whether or not the liveable situations Curiosity has discovered thus far persevered by way of these modifications. Did they disappear, by no means to return, or did they arrive and go over hundreds of thousands of years? »
Curiosity has made exceptional progress within the mountain. In 2015, the group captured a “postcard” picture of the distant mounds. A single dot on this picture is a Curiosity-sized boulder dubbed “Ilha Novo Destino” – and, almost seven years later, the rover rolled over it on its strategy to the sulphate area final month.
The group plans to spend the following few years exploring the sulphate-rich zone. Inside, they bear in mind targets just like the Gediz Vallis Channel, which can have fashioned throughout a flood late in Mount Sharp’s historical past, and huge cemented fractures that present the results groundwater increased up the mountain.
Tips on how to hold a Rover on a roll
What’s Curiosity’s secret to sustaining an energetic life-style into the ripe outdated age of 10? A group of lots of of devoted engineers, after all, working each in individual at JPL and remotely from dwelling.
They catalog each crack within the wheels, check each line of laptop code earlier than it is beamed into house, and drill infinite rock samples into JPL’s Mars Yard, making certain Curiosity can do the identical safely.
“As quickly as you land on Mars, every little thing you do is predicated on the truth that there is not any one round to repair it for 100 million miles,” Andy Mishkin, Curiosity’s appearing mission supervisor, instructed Reuters. JPL. “It is about making good use of what is already in your rover.”
Curiosity’s robotic drilling course of, for instance, has been reinvented a number of occasions since touchdown. At one level, the drill was offline for over a yr as engineers redesigned its use to be extra like a handheld drill. Extra lately, a set of braking mechanisms that allowed the robotic arm to maneuver or keep in place stopped working. Though the arm works as traditional since engineers employed a set of spares, the group additionally realized to drill extra gently to protect the brand new brakes.
To attenuate wheel harm, engineers are retaining an eye fixed out for harmful spots just like the sharp “gator-back” terrain they lately found, they usually’ve additionally developed a traction management algorithm to assist as properly.
The group took the same strategy to coping with the rover’s slowly diminishing energy. Curiosity depends on a long-lived nuclear battery quite than photo voltaic panels to maintain it rolling. Because the plutonium pellets within the battery decay, they generate warmth which the rover converts into power. As a result of gradual breakdown of the pellets, the rover can not do as a lot in a day because it did in its first yr.
Mishkin mentioned the group continues to finances how a lot power the rover makes use of every day and has decided what actions might be performed in parallel to optimize the power accessible to the rover. “Curiosity undoubtedly does extra multitasking the place it is protected to take action,” Mishkin added.
Via cautious planning and engineering hacks, the group expects the courageous rover to nonetheless have years of exploration forward of it.
Study extra concerning the mission
JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, constructed Curiosity for NASA and is main the mission on behalf of the company’s science mission directorate in Washington.
To study extra about Curiosity, go to:
http://mars.nasa.gov/msl and https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
Media contacts
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-2433
[email protected]
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501
[email protected] / [email protected]
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