Curiosity, the new Mars Rover

It was a bit hard to see. The white dome is the shell. The brown disk is the heat shield, which eventually comes off during landing.

It was hard to get a clear picture through all of the equipment, so here is a picture from a live security camera of the Mars Rover Curiosity.

Our first stop on today's tour was the Mars Rover building (that's not the real name). They are just finishing construction of the new Mars Rover. It's about as big as a small car. The engineer in charge talked with us for about 20 minutes. They're landing it an a 10 km landing area. The landing sequence is pretty complex, rocket stages taking off and all kinds of crazy stuff. I learned that NASA originally had an idea to send a rocket plane to Mars, but the idea was scrapped because they didn't realize that the propeller tips would become supersonic, sending shockwaves throughout the plane and breaking the propeller. Anyway, the engineer in charge(Peter) spent about 20 minutes explaining what they do to build the Mars Rover. The rover will fly to mars on a delta rocket, I believe. The Mars Rover is nuclear powered, using plutonium to generate heat, which is used to make electricity. The earlier rovers used solar panels which can be a problem sometimes. Once on a previous mars mission the panels were getting dirty and the rover was losing power. Eventually they knew the rover would be lost. Fortunately a small windstorm came along and blew the dust off. Anyway, this time the rover lands using nuclear power and then can drive 20 km. They are looking for signs of life. The rover can sample rocks directly. It can also sample them visually with spectrometry. It aims a laser at a rock and then watches what happens with a spectrometer. Our mentor jokingly told us that one of the reasons that a previous mars rover got stuck was that they didn't have any rednecks at NASA driving the rover to get it unstuck. Rednecks know how to get a truck unstuck in the dirt. Our mentor also had an idea of sending lots of small rovers to mars, instead of one big one. Then each rover would only need a parachute and an airbag instead of a complex landing series of steps. The people in charge didn't like his idea.

The commands from earth are delayed 8 minutes to 22 minutes because of the distance from earth to mars. It took 3 weeks to get one of the mars rovers moving, because they were afraid it would tip over as it was driving off the landing platform. The current plan is to send astronauts to mars (which would take 6 months), have them live there 1 and one half years, then have them come back. The reason is that mars and earth are sometimes on opposite sides of the sun. The closest they get is 6 months distance. The human body suffers serious, non reversible health problems after being in space for more than 6 months. The soviet astronaut who spent a year on the space station had to be carried when he returned to earth. For a while, he just laid in bed, struggling to maintain vitals. Eventually he was rehabilitated somewhat but never regained all his bone mass.