'Curiosity' Spacecraft Successfully Lands on Mars: 2-Year Hunt Begins

In an ecstatic moment of triumph for outer space exploration, the NASA's robotic 'Curiosity' spacecraft successfully landed on Mars on August 5 to begin its pioneering two-year hunt to find out if the red planet once hosted conditions suitable for life. The spacecraft is the largest and most advanced ever sent to another planet.

"Touchdown confirmed," the triumphant NASA engineer Allen Chen claimed in the control room as America's most high-tech interplanetary rover survived a harrowing plunge throughout the Mars' thin atmosphere to touch down on the red planet. The Curiosity started beaming live images from inside the crater where it had landed.

The $2.5 billion spacecraft is the largest and most advanced ever sent to another planet. The car-size, one-ton rover's descent-stage retrorockets fired, guiding it in a "sky crane" maneuver to the surface of the Mars.

Just minutes after the signal arrived that the landing had gone off successfully, Curiosity beamed back its first black-and-white thumbnail image of Mars. Soon after, a bigger image -- 256 by 256 pixels large -- showed up onscreen at the laboratory. Curiosity is expected to revolutionize the understanding of Mars, gathering evidence that Mars is or was capable of fostering life, probably in microbial form.

Leaps in Deep-Space Exploration

The spacecraft is also expected to pave the way for important leaps in deep-space exploration, including bringing Martian rock or soil back to Earth for detailed analysis and, eventually, human exploration.

Scientists have found signs of water on the red planet, though it is now a dry place with a thin atmosphere, extreme winters and dust storms.

Curiosity is not equipped to search for living or fossil microorganisms but it will look for basic ingredients essential for life, including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulphur and oxygen.

Curiosity traveled nearly 570 million kilometers since it was launched in November. The spacecraft was functioning properly as it sped toward its target.

Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking elemental composition of rocks from a distance.

The rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.

Images from Mars Released

NASA scientists have released images from the Mars rover Curiosity showing the surface of the red planet as well as images of Mars' Mount Sharp and the rim of the Gale Crater.

Images sent back to earth from the rover show aspects of the surface of Mars, including dark dunes and impact craters as well as dust moving below the robot.

NASA also released high resolution images taken from the rover. One showed Mars' Mount Sharp and another showed part of the rim of the Gale Crater shortly after the rover landed.

To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.

The landing site was 154 million miles from home, enough distance that the spacecraft's elaborate landing sequence had to be automated.

Great Expectations

An Indian scientist who was a part of the NASA team which had identified the landing site of the ‘Curiosity’ rover on the red planet, described the spot as “very exciting” and holding “great promise.”

The scientist Amitabh Ghosh, chair of the science operations working group at NASA Mars Exploration Rover Mission, was a member of the team that zeroed in on the Gale crater location where the rover successfully landed.

Sunita WillamsTakes Off for 2nd Space Odyssey: Great Moment for India

Indian-American record-setting astronaut Sunita Williams along with her two colleagues took off for her second space odyssey on a Russian Soyuz rocket, which blasted off successfully from a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 15.

NASA astronaut Williams, a record-setting astronaut who lived and worked aboard the International Space Station for six months in 2006, Russian Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency flight engineer Akihiko Hoshide started their two-day voyage at O810 IST for a four-month mission on the International Space Station (ISS).

Russia’s Federal Space Agency Roscosmos announced that the spacecraft had departed successfully from the carrier rocket and reached intermediate orbit.

The spacecraft separated from the third stage of the carrier rocket in a normal regime and at the designated time. The Soyuz TMA spacecraft is due to dock with the ISS’s Zvezda service module at 1022 IST on July 17.

Great Achievement

Born in Euclid in Ohio and raised in Massachusetts, Williams, who had earlier lived and worked aboard the ISS for six months in 2006-07, will further extend the record for the longest stay in space for a woman astronaut.

Ahead of the launch, she said that the test mission laid the ground for a long-standing friendship and collaboration in the space program.

Forty-six-year-old Williams also said that she would be excited to watch the London Summer Olympics from the station and put a much more global perspective on the mega sporting event beginning July 27.

Williams, a flight engineer on the station’s Expedition 32 crew, will take over as commander of Expedition 33 on reaching the space station.

Scientific Missions

The trio will join the current ISS occupants – Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and NASA astronaut Joe Acaba, who have been in orbit since May 17. The new crew members are expected to conduct over 30 scientific missions during their stay on board the ISS.

The six crew members will work together for about two months. Acaba, Padalka and Revin are scheduled to return to Earth on September 17.

Before they depart, Padalka will hand over command of the station and Expedition 33 to Williams. She, Malenchenko and Hoshide will return home in mid-November. The new crew members are expected to conduct over 30 scientific missions during their stay aboard the ISS.

Williams, whose father hailed from Gujarat, was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1998. She was assigned to the ISS as a member of Expedition 14 and then joined Expedition 15.

She holds the record of the longest spaceflight, 195 days, for woman space travelers. She received a Master’s degree from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1995.

In the space, Williams and her team of astronauts plan an orbital sporting event to mark the Summer Olympics in London. Both Williams and Akihiko have experience on board the space station but had never before traveled on the Soyuz.

NASA Launches Rover to Mars

An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off on November26 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, launching a $2.5 billion nuclear-powered NASA rover toward Mars to look for life habitats there. This is the third astronomical mission to be launched from Cape Canaveral by NASA since the retirement of the venerable space shuttle fleet this summer. The Juno probe is en route to Jupiter, and twin spacecraft named Grail will arrive at Earth's moon on New Year's Eve and Day.
Nine-Month Journey
The 20-story-tall booster built by United Launch Alliance lifted off from its seaside launch pad soaring through partly cloudy skies as it headed into space to send NASA's Mars Science Laboratory on a 556 million km, nearly nine-month journey to the 'Red Planet'.
The primary goal of the $2.5 billion mission is to see whether cold, dry, barren Mars might have been hospitable for microbial life once upon a time â” or might even still be conducive to life now. No actual life detectors are on board; rather, the instruments will hunt for organic compounds.
Curiosity's 7-foot (2.1-meter) arm has a jackhammer on the end to drill into the Martian red rock, and the 7-foot (2.1-meter) mast on the rover is topped with high-definition and laser cameras.
With Mars the ultimate goal for astronauts, NASA will use Curiosity to measure radiation at the red planet. The rover also has a weather station on board that will provide temperature, wind and humidity readings; a computer software app with daily weather updates is planned.
First Astrobiology Mission
"Mars Science Lab is on its way to Mars," NASA launch commentator George Diller said as the spacecraft separated from the rocket.
The car-sized rover is expected to touch down on August 6, 2012, to begin two years of detailed analysis of a 154-km wide impact basin near the Martian equator called Gale Crater. The mission's goal is to determine if Mars has or ever had environments to support life. It is the first astrobiology mission to Mars since the 1970s-era Viking probes.
Scientists chose the landing area because it has a 4.8-km high mountain of what appears from orbital imagery and mineral analysis to be layers of rock piled up like the Grand Canyon, each layer testifying to a different period in Mars' history.
The rover, nicknamed Curiosity, has 17 cameras and 10 science instruments, including chemistry labs, to identify elements in soil and rock samples to be dug up by the probe's drill-tipped robotic arm.
Curiosity is powered by heat from the radioactive decay of plutonium. It is designed to last one Martian year, or 687 Earth days.
In a spacecraft first, the rover will be lowered onto the Martian surface via a jet pack and tether system similar to the sky cranes used to lower heavy equipment into remote areas on Earth.
Curiosity is too heavy to use air bags like its much smaller predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, did in 2004. In addition, this new way should provide for a more accurate landing.