NASA Mars rover "Curiosity" launched Nov 26!

As I'm sure most of you know, NASA had a successful launch of the Mars Rover, Curiosity, and it is on its way to the Red Planet.  It's a bit of bright news in light of the troubled launch of the Russian probe, Phobos-Grunt, which was supposed to check out one of the moons.  (They were able to briefly contact the probe from an Australia station last week, though, and have hopes of getting it moving again.  Incidentally, Russia is now thinking that maybe they could hitch a ride with us or Europe next time.  Let's hope we'd give them good luck and not get their bad.)

Curiosity will land on August 5 or 6, 2012, and have a Martian-year-long mission, about 98 Earth weeks.  It's main purpose is the look for life or the possibility of life--either indigenous or supporting human colonization.  It has 10 instruments to study the land and the atmosphere, with four objectives (taken from the NASA press package):

The mission has four primary science objectives to meet NASA’s overall habitability assessment goal:

• Assess the biological potential of at least one target environment by determining the nature and inventory of organic carbon compounds, searching for the chemical building blocks of life and identifying features that may record the actions of biologically
relevant processes.

• Characterize the geology of the rover’s field site at all appropriate spatial scales by investigating the chemical, isotopic and mineralogical composition of surface and near-surface materials and interpreting the processes that have formed rocks and soils.

• Investigate planetary processes of relevance to past habitability (including the role of water) by assessing the long timescale atmospheric evolution and determining the present state, distribution and cycling of water and carbon dioxide.

• Characterize the broad spectrum of surface radiation, including galactic cosmic radiation, solar proton events and secondary neutrons.

Curiosity will not be looking for life itself.  It's not equipped to detect biological processes or to analyze (or recognize) fossils.  (Though I imagine that if it were to photograph some, there'll be some people screaming about it at NASA/JPL!)

Curiosity will be tooling around the Gale Crater, which was chosen after looking at over 30 different sites and years of debate.  This video gives the reasons why they selected it.

Congratulations, NASA and good luck, Curiosity!

For more reading:  http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/MSLLaunch.pdf
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sheets/mars-science-laboratory.pdf

Just some cool stuff today

I spent about an hour crafting a thoughtful blog about the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission...only to receive the rotten news that some of the engines failed and they have three days to fix the problem (two as of this posting) or it will be Mars Probe-Eating Goul: 17  Russia: 0.  I'm grumpy about losing all that work, disappointed for Russia and none-too-happy with Mars.  So today, I'm posting some fun space stuff courtesy of my Facebook friend, Roger Weiss, who is a great guy to follow if you like space stuff.

This awesome picture comes from Hubble, and is of two interacting galaxies, with a possible third on the upper right (where you can see the bluish clusters.)  Read more here. 

You know how some motivational experts tell you to map out your dreams, use pictures, etc?  Well, NASA has done this.  However, I can't find a graphic that isn't interactive, but the interactive is tres cool, so check it out here:  http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/globalexplorationroadmap/  If you are interested in something more detailed and less playful, there's a PDF of the roadmap developed with 12 other space agencies.


So the Orion is in the news this week.  This was part of the Bush program scrapped by Obama, which is now being repurposed to the Obama mission of going beyond low earth orbit.  So, the Orion needs to be moon-Mars ready.  (Though with their track record for Mars, let's not let the Russians help with this one.  Just in case.)

Here's the lastest test drop, to make sure that after traversing the farther reaches of space, it can actually land in water.


Here's a video of the imagined flight path for 2014. 

Enjoy the fun!  I'll write about the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission when we know better if it's a success of Russian technology and the ability to adapt or yet another episode in the Mars Hates Russian Science saga.