World

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Celebration time on Earth as Curiosity lands on Mars

NASA rover executes perfect touchdown

By: Alicia Chang and Seth Borenstein

Posted: 08/7/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Enlarge Image

NASA/JPL / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Photo from Curiosity shows gravel on Mars, rim of crater where rover sits. (CP)

Related Items

Polls
- How closely are you following the Curiosity mission to Mars?

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA celebrated the precision landing of a rover on Mars and marvelled over the mission's first photographs Monday -- grainy, black-and-white images of Martian gravel, a mountain at sunset and, most exciting of all, the spacecraft's white-knuckle plunge through the Red Planet's atmosphere.

Curiosity, a roving laboratory the size of a compact car, landed right on target late Sunday night after an eight-month, 556-million-kilometre journey.

Cheers and applause echoed through NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and engineers hugged, high-fived and thrust their fists in the air after signals from space indicated the vehicle had survived the harrowing descent through Mars' pinkish atmosphere.

JPL director Charles Elachi likened the team to Olympic athletes: "This team came back with the gold."

"Everybody in the morning should be sticking their chests out and saying, 'That's my rover on Mars,' " NASA administrator Charles Bolden said on NASA TV.

Extraordinary efforts were needed for the landing because the rover weighs about one tonne, and the thin Martian atmosphere offers little friction to slow a spacecraft down. Curiosity had to go from 20,900 km/h to zero in seven minutes, unfurling a parachute, then firing rockets to brake. In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered it to the ground at three km/h.

At the end of what NASA called "seven minutes of terror," the vehicle settled into place almost perfectly flat in the crater it was aiming for.

"We have ended one phase of the mission, much to our enjoyment," mission manager Mike Watkins said. "But another part has just begun."

Gilles Leclerc, director-general of space exploration at the Canadian Space Agency, said workers there were celebrating as well, having spent years working on a device aboard Curiosity that will help look for signs of life.

"Well, we're Canadians, eh? So it was less enthusiastic, but I would say it was as emotional as it was in the U.S. But there were cheers indeed, and it was again a great moment."

Still, there were some tense moments, he said from Longueuil, Que.

"The seven minutes of terror that we had been told to expect turned into a triumph in the end because it was a very daring landing technique and it was successful... so we were all very ecstatic."

The nuclear-powered Curiosity will dig into the Martian surface to analyze what's there and hunt for some of the molecular building blocks of life, including carbon.

It won't start moving for a couple of weeks, because all the systems on the $2.5-billion rover have to be checked out. Colour photos, panoramas and video will start coming in the next few days.

But first NASA had to use tiny cameras designed to spot hazards in front of Curiosity's wheels, so early images of gravel and shadows abounded. The pictures were fuzzy, but scientists were delighted.

The photos show "a new Mars we have never seen before," Watkins said. "So every one of those pictures is the most beautiful picture I have ever seen."

In one of the photos from the close-to-the-ground hazard cameras, if you squinted and looked the right way, you could see "a silhouette of Mount Sharp in the setting sun," said an excited John Grotzinger, chief mission scientist from the California Institute of Technology.

A high-resolution camera on the orbiting seven-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying 340 kilometres directly above the plummeting Curiosity, snapped a photo of the rover dangling from its parachute about a minute from touchdown. The parachute's design can be made out in the photo.

Curiosity is the heaviest piece of machinery NASA has landed on Mars, and the success gave the space agency confidence it can unload equipment that astronauts may need in a future manned trip to the red planet.

The landing technique was hatched in 1999 in the wake of devastating back-to-back Mars spacecraft losses. Back then, engineers had no clue how to land super-heavy spacecraft. They brainstormed possibilities, consulting Apollo-era engineers and pilots of heavy-lift helicopters.

"I think it's engineering at its finest. What engineers do is they make the impossible possible," said former NASA chief technologist Bobby Braun. "This thing is elegant... Each system was designed for a very specific function."

-- The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 7, 2012 A9

Factual inaccuracy? Something missing? Help improve our journalism.

Know about news? Share your story suggestions, photos and video.

Spelling error? Punctuation problem? Send us an email if you’ve found a typo.

More World

Undock

You can comment on most stories on winnipegfreepress.com. You can also agree or disagree with other comments. All you need to do is register and/or login and you can join the conversation and give your feedback.

Have Your Say

New to commenting? Check out our Frequently Asked Questions.

The Winnipeg Free Press does not necessarily endorse any of the views posted. By submitting your comment, you agree to our Terms and Conditions. These terms were revised effective April 16, 2010.