CTVNews.ca Staff
Published Friday, Aug. 3, 2012 8:58AM EDT
Last Updated Friday, Aug. 3, 2012 10:40PM EDT
Canadian researchers will be among the many NASA scientists likely to be on edge this weekend as the Curiosity rover prepares to land on Mars in a manoeuvre so complicated it is being described as “the seven minutes of terror.”
Seven minutes is the amount of time it will take to go from 21,000 kilometres to a complete stop and land on Mars early Monday morning, at 1:31 ET.
More than half of all attempts to land on Mars have ended in disaster. It is difficult to fly there and even harder to touch down. Only the U.S. has had successful Mars landings, but there's no guarantee this time.
But the scientists are hopeful.
For eight-and-a-half months, a spacecraft has been carrying the 900-kg, car-sized Curiosity rover toward Mars. Curiosity has been described by NASA as a smart and athletic rover.
During the nail-biting seven-minute, multi-stage landing, Curiosity will need to twist and turn as the spacecraft slowly lowers it with cables to the bottom of a crater near the foot of a mountain, guided only by onboard computers.
A mile from the surface, Curiosity will crank up its rocket-powered backpack to slow it down until it hovers. Cables will unspool from the backpack and slowly lower the rover at less than 3 km per hour.
Once the Curiosity senses touchdown, the cords will be cut.
Instruments on board include a Canadian-built sensor that will prod at the rocks for evidence Mars was once habitable.
“We're about to land a small compact car on the surface with a trunkload of instruments,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the NASA Mars Exploration Program. “This is a pretty amazing feat getting ready to happen."
In order to succeed, the rover’s landing will need to be perfect and the weather conditions favourable – no dust storms or sudden gusts of wind. Otherwise, NASA’s $2.5-billion mission that has been years in the making could be a bust.
If the rover makes a successful landing, its inbuilt video camera will have captured the most dramatic minutes for the first filming of a landing on another planet.
It takes 14 minutes for radio signals on Mars to travel to Earth. The lag means Curiosity will already be alive or dead by the time NASA finds out.
This marks NASA's 19th mission and eighth landing attempt. Earlier rovers bounced to the surface of Mars in airbags, but the latest one, built much bigger and more capable, is too heavy for that.
It’s a big financial risk in the name of taking a major technological step forward.
Scientists from the University of Guelph are among the more than 600 who have invested years in the project. They'll be at mission control in California late Sunday waiting for word it worked.
Outfitted with a mobile organic chemistry lab and a long robotic arm that can jackhammer into rocks and soil, Curiosity is to spend the next two years working to determine whether the Mars environment was ever suitable for microbes to live. Previous NASA missions discovered ice and signs that water once flowed.
With a report from CTV’s John Vennavally-Rao and files from The Associated Press
