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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Rover captures own rocket pack's impact
The Associated Press / NASA A dust plume captured by Curiosity puzzled NASA scientists. (CP)
By Alicia Chang
PASADENA, Calif. -- Space enthusiasts have been abuzz for days over whether the Mars rover Curiosity captured an extraterrestrial crash. On Friday, NASA declared the mystery solved.
Seconds after the car-sized rover parked its six wheels in an ancient crater, a tiny camera under the chassis snapped a picture revealing a smudge on the horizon. The feature disappeared in a later photo.
Was it dirt on the lens or a spinning dust devil? It turned out Curiosity spotted its own rocket-powered backpack crash-landing in the distance.
It "was an amazing coincidence that we were able to catch this impact," said engineer Steve Sell of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the $2.5-billion mission.
The nuclear-powered rover landed in Gale Crater Sunday night. It's on Mars to study whether environmental conditions could have once favoured microbes. Its ultimate target is a nearby mountain where the mineral signatures of water have been spied.
Curiosity performed a novel, complex landing routine to reach the red planet's surface. In the final seconds before touchdown, the rocket stage hovered as cables delicately lowered the rover to the ground. After landing, Curiosity cut the cords and the rocket stage flew out of the way, crashing 610 metres from the landing site.
The high-speed impact kicked up a plume of dust -- which showed up in Curiosity's field of view. Curiosity was in the right place at the right time and facing the right direction, Sell said.
Since the feat, Curiosity has returned a flood of pictures including a 360-degree colour view and a low-resolution video featuring the last minutes of its descent. Over the weekend, it will get a software update, a process that will take four days. During the hiatus, stored data will continue to be downloaded.
It will be weeks before Curiosity can take its first drive, zap at boulders or dig up soil in search of the chemical building blocks of life. The prime mission lasts two years.
A preliminary reconstruction of the "seven minutes of terror" plunge through the Martian atmosphere revealed everything went as planned. Curiosity ended up 2.41 kilometres downrange from the bull's-eye target, probably because of tail winds and a late steering turn.
"We're still happy where we landed," said Gavin Mendeck of the NASA Johnson Space Center.
-- The Associated Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 11, 2012 A22
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