With Spirit out of contact and Opportunity nearing its eighth year in operation, it's time for a new Mars rover to be deployed. The 1,980 lb. car-sized Curiosity is scheduled to blast off into space aboard a rocket in Florida on November 25. It will spend nine whole months traveling toward Mars before it can join Opportunity in its probing of the red planet.
The $2.5 billion Curiosity is the biggest Mars rover yet, and is designed to travel farther and last longer than any of its predecessors. Its mission? To find out if Mars was ever hospitable to life. After careful selection by the scientists, the Gale Crater was chosen as the rover's landing site due to fact that its rocks come from various periods of the planet's history.
This rover is the first to address the next goal, which is to search for habitable environments. We're landing on a place that has the potential to have been habitable in the past, one that could have supported life, and we want to understand whether that actually was the case," says NASA Jet Propulsion Lab's, Ashwin Vasavada.
Curiosity will bring with it 10 different scientific instruments to test the various chemical and geologic properties of Martian rock samples. It can traverse grounds and reach places the other rovers can't, as it's designed to roll over obstacles up to 29" in height and cover 295' of ground within an hour.
When it arrives on Mars in 2012, the spacecraft carrying it will descend halfway using a parachute, carrying the rover like a flying crane. It takes seven minutes from the time the craft descends until the rover touches ground, and Vasavada says the entire mission relies on "everything going right in that seven minutes."
With the kind of mission Curiosity has, we bet it will have the most interesting reports to send back to Earth once it begins working. Who knows ? it may discover something even better than the possibility of flowing surface water that proves there used to be life on Mars!
(Source)
This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca
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