PASADENA, Calif (Reuters) – The Mars rover Curiosity, the most sophisticated mobile science lab ever sent to another world, hurtled closer to the Red Planet yesterday, on track “to fly through the eye of the needle” for a precise, safe landing on Sunday night, NASA officials said.
Mission control engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles acknowledge that delivering the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover in one piece is a highly risky proposition under the best of circumstances.
But JPL’s team said the spacecraft and its systems were all healthy and performing flawlessly, and that weather forecasts over the landing zone on Mars were favorable, as Curiosity streaked to within 2.8 million miles (4.5 million km) of its destination.
NASA, facing deep cuts in its science budget and struggling to regain its footing after cancellation of the space shuttle programme, the agency’s centrepiece for 30 years, has a lot riding on a successful Mars landing.
Mars is the chief component of NASA’s long-term deep space exploration plans. Curiosity is designed primarily to search for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth may have once harboured ingredients necessary for microbial life to evolve.
After an eight-month voyage of more than 350 million miles (567 million km), engineers said they were hopeful that the rover will land precisely as planned near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of a vast impact basin called Gale Crater.
“We’re on target to fly through the eye of the needle,” Arthur Amador, the Mars Science Laboratory mission manager, told reporters at a briefing about 36 hours before landing time.
Touchdown is scheduled for 10.31 pm today Pacific time (0531 GMT tomorrow).
With Curiosity in the final stretch of its journey encased in a capsule-like shell, the spacecraft is essentially flying on automatic pilot, guided by a computer packed with pre-programmed instructions.
Precise approach
So precise has the vessel’s approach to Mars been that NASA engineers passed on one last opportunity to perform a trajectory adjustment by remote control on Friday.
Today, mission control will activate the craft’s backup computer, ensuring that it will assume onboard command of the vessel should the primary computer fail during entry into the Martian atmosphere and its tricky descent to the surface.
Two hours before atmospheric entry, mission control will send its very last transmission to Curiosity, a “parameter update” giving the craft its exact position in space.
After that, controllers will have little to do but anxiously track Curiosity’s progress as it flies into Mars’ upper atmosphere at 13,000 miles (20,921 km) per hour, 17 times the speed of sound, and begins a descent and landing sequence NASA refers to as “the seven minutes of terror.”
