The next generation Rover however is ready to carry on with even more advanced instrumentation……and its name is CURIOSITY.
Curiosity is almost twice as long and five times heavier (2,000 pounds) as Spirit and Opportunity. But before Curiosity can explore Mars, it has to get there.
The nose cone or fairing, carrying the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) falls open like a clamshell and falls away.
After this, the rocket’s first stage cuts off and drops into the Atlantic Ocean.
The rocket’s second stage, a Centaur engine, is started and boosts the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and sends it toward Mars.
Once the spacecraft is in cruise stage toward Mars, it begins communicating with Earth.
The last stage gives the spacecraft a final push for its 8 ½ month cruise to the red planet.
Hitting the atmosphere at about 13,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft begins to slow down. While slowing down, the spacecraft uses thrusters to help steer toward the landing site.
It throws off weights to rebalance the spacecraft, so that it is lined up for the parachute deployment.
Once it is below the speed of sound, the heat shield separates and the spacecraft looks for the ground with the landing radar.
Once it reaches an altitude of about 1 mile, the spacecraft drops out of the back-shell at about 200 miles an hour.
It then fires up the landing engine to slow it down even further.
Once it has descended to about 60 feet above the ground, and going only about 2 miles per hour, the rover separates from the descent stage.
As the rover is lowered, the wheels deploy in preparation for landing.
Once the rover is safely on the ground, and touchdown has been detected, the descent stage cuts the rover loose. It flies away leaving Curiosity safe on the surface of Mars.
One of the first things Curiosity does after landing is to deploy the mast, which supports many cameras and instruments.
The Curiosity rover has 10 science instruments including: A gas chromatograph, a gas spectrometer, and a tunable laser spectrometer to identify a wide range of organic compounds.
An x-ray diffraction and fluorescence instrument named CheMin designed to identify and quantify minerals in rocks and soils.
A Hand Lens Imager to take extreme close-up pictures of rocks and soil revealing details smaller than the width of a human hair.
An Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer to detect different elements in rocks and soils.
A Camera mounted on the Mast capable of capturing images of the rover’s surroundings in high resolution and color.
An instrument named ChemCam capable of vaporizing thin layers of material from rocks or soil designed to identify atoms and capture detailed images of the area.
The drill on the arm allows it to grab some of that rock and deliver it to the laboratory instruments inside the body of the rover,
and the Radiation Assessment Detector to analyze the radiation environment at the surface. This information will be necessary for planning human exploration of Mars and its ability to sustain life.
These instruments can get us even closer to understanding whether life could have existed on Mars.
Curiosity will be exploring the red planet for at least 2 years ……and ….there’s no telling what we will discover.