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Planetary scientists sometimes joke that we know more about Mars than we do about the moon. NASA first landed a spacecraft on the surface of the fourth planet during the U.S. Bicentennial, five years before the first space shuttle ever lifted off. And we’ve learned plenty in the intervening 35 years: Viking 1 and 2 analyzed Mars rocks, Spirit and Opportunity found evidence of ancient water, and Phoenix saw the Martian snow. Yet the biggest question — whether Mars could ever be home to life — still eludes us.

NASA’s newest rover, Curiosity, sets off this week in search of answers. It’s the most complex interplanetary explorer ever, earning a PopSci 2011 Best of What’s New award. If everything goes to plan — from Saturday’s thundering Atlas V launch to the rover’s self-piloted atmospheric entry and hovercraft airdrop — it just might become the type of once-in-a-generation explorer that raises even more questions than it answers.

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The Mars Science Laboratory mission is much more than the wheeled, sedan-sized, beefy-armed rover Curiosity. Its hovercraft sky crane and guided landing system is a major feat in itself, enabling NASA to land the rover with the utmost precision. With 11 tools designed for zapping, baking and X-raying rocks, it is the most advanced robotic geologist ever built. It will look for the chemical ingredients for life — oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and/or hydrogen — the first Mars rover capable of doing so.

“We will be able to do chemistry better than any other spacecraft. We will know, element by element, what is there, and we’ll see chemical isotopes as well,” said Ashwin Vasavada, MSL deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the rover was built. “We will not only know what elements are there, but what minerals they formed into, and that tells you the exact temperature, the amount of water around, and the environmental conditions in which those minerals formed.”

When MSL was being planned, shortly after Spirit and Opportunity started driving around, NASA engineers said they wanted two things: A much more precise landing, the better to pinpoint rocks to study, and a rover that could drill into those rocks and sample their insides. The guided landing will place Curiosity within a 12-mile by 15-mile ellipse — it may sound pretty imprecise compared to Earth-based airdrop tech, but remember that this is 45 million miles away on another planet. (Spirit and Opportunity landed in a 90-mile ellipse.)

But that’s just the beginning. Here’s a peek at some of the key new technologies that will enable MSL’s journey of discovery.

A GUIDED DESCENT AND HOVERCRAFT AIRDROP

Barring any problems, Saturday’s launch from Cape Canaveral will set Curiosity on a course for Mars arrival in August of next year. When it approaches the Red Planet, its aeroshell, shaped like a chicken pot pie, will shed its hydrazine-powered cruise stage and tip its heat shield toward the planet. Thrusters on the backshell will correct the bulky 15-foot-diameter saucer and guide its descent, aiming it precisely for a flat surface in Gale Crater.

For five nanoseconds, Curiosity’s laser directs the energy of a million light bulbs onto a spot of rock the size of a pinhead.When atmospheric friction has slowed it sufficiently, a 165-foot-long, 51-foot-diameter parachute will unfurl — the largest one ever on another planet, designed to withstand Mach 2.2 speeds — and the heat shield will jettison, enabling a radar system to start tracking surface distance. At this point, Curiosity is pointed wheels-down toward the surface of Mars. And there are no airbags.

“It is too big and heavy to put in airbags, and the engineers here realized that if you’re not using airbags, the other alternative is to land it on some kind of platform,” Vasavada said. “But when you’re building this very sturdy rover with its own wheels and suspension, it can take the load of landing on Mars on its own wheels. That turned out to be the best way to land it.”

Down plummets Curiosity, wheels first, and the chute is jettisoned once the rover is a few hundred feet off the ground. Then eight retro-rockets on the hovercraft fire, further slowing the spacecraft’s descent. Three tethers and a communications umbilical cord unfurl, and slowly set the rover on the ground. Once the lines go slack, the rover cuts them off and the hovercraft flies away to crash in a safe place. This will all be captured in 5 frames-per-second high-definition video.

And it all happens autonomously, by the way. The speed of light delay between Earth and Mars makes it impossible to control the rover in real time, so if an unexpected gust or Martian dust devil comes along, the rover will have to handle that by itself.

The guided landing will be a boon for geologists, Vasavada said.

“It meant we could get much closer in, and snuggle up the landing next to features that would be too dangerous to land on, which always turn out to be the more interesting geologic things. Most of the things we want to study on Mars are not flat, boring things,” he said.

Once Curiosity checks out healthy, it will snap several 3-D HD panoramic photos of its surroundings, and pinpoint some interesting things to look at. When scientists on Earth have some targets, the ChemCam instrument will get to work.

CHEMCAM: A LASER TO ZAP MARS ROCKS

MSL’s science missions will unfold with the regimented precision of any good working laboratory. In careful sequence, 11 instruments will peer at a Mars rock, zap holes into it, drill the holes, collect the drill dust, sift and sieve it, bake it and X-ray it, characterizing everything there is to know about that rock and its history. The bulk of the work begins with ChemCam, MSL’s laser and camera.

From a distance of nearly 25 feet, the laser zaps material from the surface of a rock, dusting it off and ablating weatherized surfaces, creating a plasma that can be analyzed using the instrument’s telescope. For just five nanoseconds, the laser directs the energy of a million light bulbs into the area the size of a pinhead, said Roger Wiens, the instrument’s principal investigator, based at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“ChemCam is supposed to be a workhorse for the rover in identifying unique samples for the other instruments to spend more time on,” he said. “The ability to reach out and touch the rock from almost 25 feet away is a real advantage.”

One ChemCam sample would entail taking a closeup picture of a rock, then a wide-angle shot, and then firing up to 75 laser pulses. It can analyze one sample every six minutes, using just two watt-hours of power.

Mastcam = Mast Camera; ChemCam = Chemistry and Camera instrument; RAD = Radiation Assessment Detector; CheMin = Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument; SAM = Sample Analysis at Mars gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer; DAN = Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons; MAHLI = Mars Hand Lens Imager; APXS = Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer; REMS = Rover Environmental Monitoring Station. MARDI, the Mars Descent Imager, will shoot video of the rover's descent. The brush, drill, sieves and scoop are tools on the rover's robotic arm.

Curiosity Science Payload

Mastcam = Mast Camera; ChemCam = Chemistry and Camera instrument; RAD = Radiation Assessment Detector; CheMin = Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument; SAM = Sample Analysis at Mars gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer; DAN = Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons; MAHLI = Mars Hand Lens Imager; APXS = Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer; REMS = Rover Environmental Monitoring Station. MARDI, the Mars Descent Imager, will shoot video of the rover’s descent. The brush, drill, sieves and scoop are tools on the rover’s robotic arm.

This hands-free rock ID works by analyzing the spectra of light emitted by the vaporized sample, pinpointing emission lines that are the telltale signature of atomic elements. It covers a wavelength (240 nanometers to 900 nm, for those of you who keep track of these things) that covers the entire periodic table, Wiens said. The laser is designed for 5 million pulses — a lot of rocks to blast, and a lot of element-hunting to do.

Because ChemCam will help the rest of the roving laboratory find its targets, Wiens expects it to be called into action almost every day throughout the rover’s two-year (in Earth years) primary mission. Luckily for ChemCam’s science team, the instrument is a collaboration with the French space agency, so international partners will share half the burden.

After ChemCam’s hands-free analysis, MSL scientists might decide to drive the rover to an interesting rock and start getting dirty.

BAKING MARS PEBBLES AND JIGGLING DIRT IN FRONT OF X-RAYS

Among MSL’s many firsts is its shrunken X-ray machine, a real feat of engineering that has already enabled a suite of new Earth spinoffs. The CheMin instrument, short for “Chemistry and Mineralogy,” brings a standard method of elemental identification to the surface of another world for the first time. X-ray diffraction identifies minerals by examining the diffraction patterns of X-rays that pass through the spaces in between atoms, said David Blake, CheMin’s principal investigator, from NASA’s Ames Research Center.

“If you’re ever driving by a field of trees that are planted regularly, you can look down the rows, and every once in a while you can see a path right through them. There are various patterns in a crystal that are like that, where light goes through, and these are patterns where diffraction occurs,” he said. “All crystalline materials have slightly different diffraction patterns, so diffraction tells you, without any kind of quibbling, what is the exact material you are looking at.”

To take this type of measurement, you would spread out sifted rock samples and ideally bounce them around, sending them flying past the X-ray source. But moving parts are generally a nonstarter on a spacecraft. To get around this, Blake and his team had to design a piezoelectric device that jiggles the sand grains. The design is partly inspired on a bunch of small buzzers Blake and colleagues bought from Radio Shack several years ago. When CheMin is in operation, it moves at a frequency rate roughly that of a double-high C note — it’ll sound like a soprano singer.

Blake has been working on a miniaturized X-ray diffraction machine for more than 20 years, he said. It’s the best way to identify a mineral, which is the best way to learn the environment in which a rock formed, and if there were any constituents that might have been handy for prebiotic compounds or even life, Blake said.

MSL’s other instruments will all be looking for this, too.

Alongside the CheMin array, the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument will heat up the drilled sample and gassify its contents, examining the vapor with a gas chromatograph and two types of spectrometers. As a sample is heated, different materials become volatile and are emitted as gas — like water, to start. The contents of these vapors can be detected to determine a material’s composition. This will be one of the key ways in which MSL will look for signs of life. Finding any such evidence would be paradigm-shattering, to say the least, so MSL is equipped with a self-test kit, Vasavada said. It’s a ceramic sample-blank that contains an engineered organic compound — not life, but a fluorinated organic compound that would not occur in real life on Earth. If there’s ever any controversy about SAM’s organic material analysis, the sample blank will help verify its analytical integrity.

If all this sounds repetitive, that’s because it is — and that’s part of the point, according to Vasavada.

“There are several different ways of looking at a rock, and no single technique is unambiguous,” he said. “When we have confirmation two or three ways that a rock has that mineral in there, or that element, then we can piece that story together, by integrating the results from all these different instruments.”

MSL’s primary goal is a one-Mars-year, two-Earth-year primary investigative mission, but this could be extended and likely will, should Curiosity fare as well as its forebears. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers, designed to perform for three months, outlasted their warranty by nearly eight years (and counting, for Opportunity). Engineers hope Curiosity will roll across the Red Planet for a decade.

“This isn’t a mission where you land, get as much information as you can, and everything else is gravy,” Vasavada said. “This is a mission that is planned to unfold over the course of a couple of years.”

So Curiosity will have plenty of time to answer deep questions — and potentially open brand-new profound ones too.

This artist's concept depicts the Curiosity rover using its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to investigate the composition of a rock surface. ChemCam fires laser pulses at a target and views the resulting spark with a telescope and spectrometers to identify chemical elements. The laser is actually in an invisible infrared wavelength, but is shown here as visible red light for purposes of illustration.

Curiosity on Mars

This artist’s concept depicts the Curiosity rover using its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to investigate the composition of a rock surface. ChemCam fires laser pulses at a target and views the resulting spark with a telescope and spectrometers to identify chemical elements. The laser is actually in an invisible infrared wavelength, but is shown here as visible red light for purposes of illustration.
The Curiosity rover will land in a northern portion of Gale Crater in August 2012. This view of Gale is a mosaic of observations made in visible light by the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Gale is 96 miles in diameter and holds a <a href="https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/curiosity-rover-mission-may-be-uphill-climb-literally/">layered mountain</a> rising about 3 miles above the crater floor. The ellipse superimposed on this image indicates the intended landing area, which is 12.4 miles by 15.5 miles. The portion of the crater within the landing area has an alluvial fan, likely formed by water-carried sediments. The lower layers of the nearby mountain, which are within driving distance for Curiosity, contain minerals indicating a wet history.

Curiosity’s Future Home: Gale Crater

The Curiosity rover will land in a northern portion of Gale Crater in August 2012. This view of Gale is a mosaic of observations made in visible light by the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Gale is 96 miles in diameter and holds a layered mountain rising about 3 miles above the crater floor. The ellipse superimposed on this image indicates the intended landing area, which is 12.4 miles by 15.5 miles. The portion of the crater within the landing area has an alluvial fan, likely formed by water-carried sediments. The lower layers of the nearby mountain, which are within driving distance for Curiosity, contain minerals indicating a wet history.
The turret at the end of Curiosity's robotic arm holds five devices. In this view, the drill is at the six o'clock position. Clockwise from six o'clock: Collection and Handling for In-situ Martian Rock Analysis device, or CHIMRA, includes a soil scoop and a set of chambers and labyrinths for sieving, sorting and portioning samples of rock powder or soil for delivery to analytical instruments. At 10 o'clock is the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer. Behind the forearm are the Mars Hand Lens Imager and the Dust Removal Tool.

Arm Raised

The turret at the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm holds five devices. In this view, the drill is at the six o’clock position. Clockwise from six o’clock: Collection and Handling for In-situ Martian Rock Analysis device, or CHIMRA, includes a soil scoop and a set of chambers and labyrinths for sieving, sorting and portioning samples of rock powder or soil for delivery to analytical instruments. At 10 o’clock is the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer. Behind the forearm are the Mars Hand Lens Imager and the Dust Removal Tool.
Curiosity is prepared for final integration into the complete spacecraft in this photograph taken inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA Kennedy Space Center. The rover is just one part of the complex MSL mission — read on to find out more about it.

Ready to Go

Curiosity is prepared for final integration into the complete spacecraft in this photograph taken inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA Kennedy Space Center. The rover is just one part of the complex MSL mission — read on to find out more about it.
Do you have 3-D glasses? Check out this stereo image of Curiosity, taken in May at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Curiosity in 3-D

Do you have 3-D glasses? Check out this stereo image of Curiosity, taken in May at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Curiosity will touch down on Mars using a complex "sky crane" descent stage, unlike other planetary explorers that have bounced around with parachutes and balloons. You can see an <a href="https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-04/video-new-mars-rover-will-land-using-sky-crane-solar-system-first/">animation of it here</a>.

Curiosity Descent Stage

Curiosity will touch down on Mars using a complex “sky crane” descent stage, unlike other planetary explorers that have bounced around with parachutes and balloons. You can see an animation of it here.
This image shows the payload fairing encasing the Curiosity rover, its instruments, heat shield and descent stage. The fairing is designed to protect the spacecraft from the heat, g-forces and shaking of launch. Curiosity is launching aboard an Atlas V rocket, a two-stage beast that will give the mission enough thrust to escape Earth's gravity. The rover will arrive on Mars next August.

Atlas V Fairing Protects Curiosity

This image shows the payload fairing encasing the Curiosity rover, its instruments, heat shield and descent stage. The fairing is designed to protect the spacecraft from the heat, g-forces and shaking of launch. Curiosity is launching aboard an Atlas V rocket, a two-stage beast that will give the mission enough thrust to escape Earth’s gravity. The rover will arrive on Mars next August.
This artist's concept shows the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft approaching Mars. In this illustration, the Curiosity rover is safely tucked inside the spacecraft's aeroshell. The mission's approach phase begins 45 minutes before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere, according to NASA. For navigation purposes, the atmospheric entry point is 2,188 miles above the center of the planet. This illustration depicts a scene after the spacecraft's cruise stage has been jettisoned, which will occur 10 minutes before atmospheric entry.

Mars Science Lab Approaching

This artist’s concept shows the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft approaching Mars. In this illustration, the Curiosity rover is safely tucked inside the spacecraft’s aeroshell. The mission’s approach phase begins 45 minutes before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere, according to NASA. For navigation purposes, the atmospheric entry point is 2,188 miles above the center of the planet. This illustration depicts a scene after the spacecraft’s cruise stage has been jettisoned, which will occur 10 minutes before atmospheric entry.
This scene here is no doubt one of the most awesome aspects of this mission. As spacecraft go, the car-sized Curiosity rover is gigantic, weighing more than a ton, so there's no way to safely land it with a bouncy airbag drop like its predecessors did. Instead, Curiosity will touch down with this hovercraft sky crane, which can place the rover directly on its wheels. This ultra-precise airdrop will allow the rover to land within a much more precise area. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers had a roughly 93-mile by 12-mile ellipse in which to land, but Curiosity will touch down within a 12x15-mile oval. This incredible precision will allow scientists to pinpoint exactly where they want Curiosity to go. In this scene, the MSL descent stage controls its own rate of descent using four of its eight rocket engines. It has started lowering Curiosity in a bridle. Three nylon tethers and an umbilical cord connect the rover to its landing craft. As soon as the rover touches down, the rover cuts off its bridle, and the hovercraft zooms away to crash somewhere far away from the landing site.

Airdropping Precious Cargo

This scene here is no doubt one of the most awesome aspects of this mission. As spacecraft go, the car-sized Curiosity rover is gigantic, weighing more than a ton, so there’s no way to safely land it with a bouncy airbag drop like its predecessors did. Instead, Curiosity will touch down with this hovercraft sky crane, which can place the rover directly on its wheels. This ultra-precise airdrop will allow the rover to land within a much more precise area. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers had a roughly 93-mile by 12-mile ellipse in which to land, but Curiosity will touch down within a 12×15-mile oval. This incredible precision will allow scientists to pinpoint exactly where they want Curiosity to go. In this scene, the MSL descent stage controls its own rate of descent using four of its eight rocket engines. It has started lowering Curiosity in a bridle. Three nylon tethers and an umbilical cord connect the rover to its landing craft. As soon as the rover touches down, the rover cuts off its bridle, and the hovercraft zooms away to crash somewhere far away from the landing site.
An artist's impression of Curiosity safely on the surface.

Touchdown!

An artist’s impression of Curiosity safely on the surface.
In this image, Curiosity stands tall, with its "head" reaching about 6.9 feet above ground level. It will use its 10 science tools to investigate Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life.

Ready to Get to Work

In this image, Curiosity stands tall, with its “head” reaching about 6.9 feet above ground level. It will use its 10 science tools to investigate Mars’ past or present ability to sustain microbial life.
Isn't she pretty?

The Next Mars Rover

Isn’t she pretty?