[ Sound Effects ]
Hi I'm Alicia and this is NASA Now.
[ Music ]
Status check to proceed with terminal count.
Atlas systems, propulsion?
-- Go!
Hydraulics?
-- Go!
Pneumatics?
-- Go!
LO2? -- Go!
Water? -- Go!
Centaur systems, propulsion?
-- Go!
Redline monitor?
-- Go!
Quality? -- Go!
OSM? -- Go!
ULA Safety Officer -- Go
Range, weather and clear to proceed.
T minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4
3, 2, 1
[ Roar Of Rocket Engines ]
The journey to Mars is so long
because it's not really a direct flight.
The Earth is moving and Mars is moving,
so what we're really doing is charting a path that sends us
from the Earth and we're catching up to
where Mars will be at the time that we get there.
[ Sound Effects and Music ]
This month we will be celebrating the successful
landing of the Mars rover Curiosity with a series
of shows dedicated to this monumental event.
That's ahead, first here's what's happening at NASA Now.
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After eight years of planning, eight months
in interplanetary travel and seven minutes
of terror the dream became reality.
Touch down confirmed, we're safe on Mars.
[ Big Cheers and Applause ]
The cheers were heard in Times Square, on TV and computers
around the world when on August 6th
at 1:32 AM eastern daylight time, Curiosity landed safely
and started transmitting images from the Red Planet's surface.
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The path to success for a complex mission
like Curiosity takes a lot of talented people with training
in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Just about a month before it touched
down on the Martian surface, we caught up with Nagin Cox,
a member of the mission operations team
and Nagin walked us through the process that led
from the drawing board to the historic landing of Curiosity.
[ Music ]
When Spirit and Opportunity successfully completed their
prime mission and told us
that there was once liquid water on Mars.
What an amazing conclusion, and one that we had hoped to find.
So even as they were making that discovery, we were beginning
to think about the next mission and in this case,
for the next step in exploration,
we needed to take more instruments to Mars.
So it was clear that Curiosity would have to be bigger.
So right away, a separate team called the entry, descent,
and landing team began a series of way out design discussions
about how do we get something larger to Mars,
and on a third parallel track was the team building the rover
and figuring out how we would operate something so large
and with such expectations of driving around on Mars.
All of that design work was happening while Spirit
and Opportunity were doing their exploration.
[ Music ]
The environment of Mars always has unknown aspects to it.
We are still explorers, so the safest thing you can do is try
to test as much as you can.
And we did that extensively in 2007 and 2008.
Now the opportunities that we have to land
on Mars come every two years and our original launch date was
in 2009, but when we were getting close to 2009,
it became clear to us that given that this was one of,
if not the most complicated, planetary mission ever launched
and we had this incredibly new and necessary
but complicated landing system
that we needed more time to test it.
And because of the planetary launch window,
we made the decision to wait until 2011
to really give us time to complete our testing
and complete our design and make sure
that we had everything ready to go.
[ Music ]
Liftoff!
When we're on our way from the Earth to Mars,
one of the major things we're doing of course is navigating,
so we do a series of trajectory correction maneuvers.
In order to do those course corrections, kind of like turns,
we have to know where we are and where Mars is.
We do things like look at something called a quasar
where we know where that body is in space.
It's a reference point.
So we look at that with our antennas that are on the ground,
then we look at the spacecraft, then we look at the quasar again
and we see how far the spacecraft is away by finding
out how long it takes the signal to come back to us.
All of those to combine to give our expert navigators a picture
of where the spacecraft is and how we have to kind of turn it
or push it when we do our maneuvers to get us right
on target for the landing on Mars.
And Curiosity was right on target when it landed
on Mars near the equator.
[ Sound Effects ]
Now it's your turn to calculate Curiosity's 100 million mile
journey to Mars.
[ Sound Effects ]
Teachers you and your students have your destination set
and it's Mars.
Now it's up to your class to figure out how
to get your spacecraft to the red planet.
Look for Destination Mars
on the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus.
[ Sound Effects ]
Well that's it for this special Mars edition of NASA NOW.
Be sure to visit our Facebook page and leave a comment
about what you think Curiosity will discover on Mars.
We'll see you next time
for another Mars Month episode of NASA NOW!
[ Sound Effects ]
NASA Now comes to you from the Virtual Campus
at NASA Explorer Schools.
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