It was one of the most incredibly difficult technical challenges NASA has faced in its entire history, but they pulled it off. Not only did the 1-ton SUV-sized Curiosity manage to travel all the way to Mars from Earth, an achievement that is already remarkable, not only did it aerobrake in Mars’ thin atmosphere, parachute close to the surface, descend even closer on rockets, and then lower itself to the ground on cables to rest gently on the ground, it did all of this while maintaining an active twitter connection!
Well, no, not actually, I’m fairly sure they had someone on Earth manning the twitter account, but they DID maintain a strong data connection on a 14-minute return trip delay, and that @MarsCuriosity account wasted no time in sharing the rover’s perspective on the day’s events.
It once was one small step… now it’s six big wheels. Here’s a look at one of them on the soil of Mars
#MSL twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/…— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 6, 2012
No photo or it didn’t happen? Well lookee here, I’m casting a shadow on the ground in Mars’ Gale crater
#MSL twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/…— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 6, 2012
This is a huge event in science history, but one thing that’s important to note is that the difficulties NASA faced in getting Curiosity to Mars don’t represent the big news yet. This is just the beginning of the story; now the science really begins. For the next two years at least, if everything goes as smoothly as the landing did, the rover will be on a mission to collect all sorts of data on Mars’ composition in an attempt to learn more about conditions on Mars in the past.
Curiosity is not on a mission to discover if life exists now on Mars; it’s looking instead for evidence if conditions ever existed that might have allowed life. To accomplish this, it is equipped with a big laser that it can use to analyze the elements found in rock samples, in much the same way that scientists on Earth can burn a material sample to analyze the elements present.
They also included a color camera on this rover, so hopefully very soon we’ll be able to get real-color images taken from the Mars surface. This is an exciting time in space exploration!
If somehow you missed NASA’s 7 Minutes of Terror video that depicts the whole Curiosity descent sequence, you can check it out here.
Did you stay up to watch the event as it happened? Tell us all about it in the comments!