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| Curiosity Approaches Mars/NASA graphic |
The aptly-named Curiosity rover will land on Mars at 10:31 Pacific Daylight Time Sunday night, if all goes as planned. Its 13,200 mph plummet into the Red planet's atmosphere will require a seven-minute descent with the assistance of a sky crane to ensure a successful touchdown. Engineers call that descent "Seven Minutes of Terror"because they had create the plan for its landing. Adam Seltzer,
explained, "The big trick is you are going 13,000 miles an hour. You slam into the Martian atmosphere and you want to gracefully get the spacecraft down sitting quietly on the surface on her wheels, and all of that takes different changes in the configuration of the vehicle, 79 events that must occur."
The Curiosity Rover shown in a NASA graphic at right, enters the planet’s atmosphere on its journey to the its final destination. At this angle, it resembles the flying saucers depicted in science fiction decades ago.
The NASA graphic above portrays the ideal outcome of the last hundred feet of Curiosity's journey to the bottom of the Gale Crater, a depository of evolutionary data about the planet. At that point, the sky crane will drop its cables, leaving the space lab to gather data for the next two years. Scientists hope it will discover signs of microbial life that might indicate higher forms of life might also have existed there.
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