NASA Readies Vehicle for Mars Mission

15 November 2011

An artist created this view of the Curiosity rover surveying the surface of Mars. The spacecraft is set to launch in late November, arriving at Mars in August.

An artist depicts the descent of the spacecraft carrying the Curiosity rover to the Martian surface.

The United States is preparing to send another exploratory vehicle to the planet Mars, the “largest and most complex piece of equipment to ever be placed on the surface of another planet,” said the director of the Mars exploration program, Doug McCuistion.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), to be launched in coming weeks, is “truly a wonder in engineering,” McCuistion said at a press briefing.

MSL marks a new generation of vehicles with much greater capabilities in a 20-year plan to study Mars. The rover weighs about 900 kilograms and is 2 meters tall. McCuistion said, “We have ever increasing payloads, we’ve got more accurate landing capabilities, we’ve got longer-lived systems on the planet with nuclear power, and we’ve got state-of-the art instruments aboard.”

MSL is the successor to Opportunity and Spirit, twin rovers that NASA landed on Mars in 2004. They completed a three-month primary mission that year, but continued to slowly explore the planet, returning images of the Martian surface to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Spirit ceased returning data in 2010, but Opportunity still serves as an eye on Mars for the scientists who built the craft.

The MSL mission will arrive at Mars in eight months and will deploy the rover Curiosity to explore Gale Crater, which, according to orbital observations of the planet, may have had an environment capable of supporting life in the past. That is the rover’s main mission, McCuistion said, “to try and understand if it was ever habitable.”

Spirit and Opportunity paved the way for Curiosity’s mission with their discoveries that wet environments did exist on ancient Mars, but which of those formerly wet spots may have indeed supported life? The new rover will gather data to answer that question, said Mars scientist Ashwin Vasavada. “This mission is setting us up for the time when we actually go to do the search for life,” he said. “You have to understand pretty much about Mars to understand where to go to do those experiments.”

While the planetary mission of MSL is the primary goal, the job of getting the rig to the fourth planet from our sun will be no small achievement either. In fact, the mission depends on three vehicles, said MSL Project Manager Pete Theisinger. “There is the vehicle that gets you to Mars. There is the vehicle that actually penetrates the atmosphere and goes through the entry, descent and landing portion of the mission; and then there is the rover that eventually gets deposited on the surface.”

McCuistion said the mission relies on the best in U.S. imagination and innovation with support from partners in France, Canada, Germany, Russia and Spain. Vasavada said the rover Curiosity will provide a “virtual presence” on Mars for more than 200 scientists around the world, using 10 different scientific instruments to survey the landscape, collect samples from the surface, analyze the chemical composition of the Martian soil, and provide weather data.

“The crowning achievement,” Vasavada said, is the capability “to drill into rocks and capture material from the inside of rocks, which we’ve never done before on Mars.” After a rock sample is drilled, Curiosity’s robotic arm will deliver the sample to sophisticated instruments in the roving laboratory that will analyze the elements in the sample and test for any organic matter.

The MSL mission is designed to help scientists understand how Mars might have supported life, but it will also help international science teams understand the capabilities they must reach to support a human presence on the planet. McCuistion said the MSL effort has already led to greater precision in targeting landing sites and greater capabilities to land larger payloads and handle samples robotically. Improving technology in all these areas will lead to another generation of equipment to support a human mission to Mars.

The three vehicles are stacked and positioned on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The window to launch begins November 25 and extends to December 18. After the craft arrives at the Red Planet in August, it will have a primary mission lasting one Martian year, which is almost two Earth years.