By the end of August, the nuclear-powered rover Curiosity will take its first, tentative steps on the surface of Mars, rolling a meter or two forward on its six aluminum wheels across the flat floor of Gale Crater.
By then, controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here probably will have finished checking out Curiosity's complex systems and calibrating its suite of 10 sophisticated instruments. With plans to spend at least two years exploring the crater and the 18,000-ft. mountain in its center, they are in no hurry.
Even in the unlikely event Curiosity suffers the interplanetary equivalent of a freeway crash that shuts the mission down suddenly and for good, it has already validated another way to put payloads on extraterrestrial surfaces. At a deeper level, it has also given the engineers who invented the now-famous “sky crane” technique more confidence that they know what it will take to do the same thing with humans.
“From an engineering perspective, this was really the linchpin we needed to prove that we can put a metric ton on the surface,” says Doug McQuistion, NASA's Mars exploration director. “That opens the door to all kinds of science instrumentation [and] science missions, whether they're rovers or fixed landers or palletized instrument sets or whatever they might be. All of the studies we've done over the years, we believe that pretty much anything we need to do scientifically or robotically can be done within a metric ton.”
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