The Martian rover, Curiosity, yesterday landed safely on the red planet and began to beam images back to the earth.
The one-tonne vehicle, landed in a deep crater near the planet’s equator at about 7.32am. Its mission is to roam around Mars at 4cm per second and look for evidence that Mars may have once supported life. While this has been hailed as a major success by Nasa, it is a success for the whole of humanity.
Mission control had a tense 13 minute wait as the vehicle completed a series of complicated manoeuvres and set down gently in a crater on the red planet.
Within minutes, the robot was returning its first low-resolution images – showing views of the horizon in black and white. A first colour high-resolution image of Curiosity’s surroundings should be returned in the next couple of days.
Engineers and scientists who have worked on this project for the best part of 10 years punched the air and hugged each other. In a moment of levity, the controllers updated the rover’s Twitter feed by announcing: “I’m safely on the surface of Mars. Gale Crater I am in you!!!”
The journey to Mars was an amazing 570 million kilometre one and the vehicle had to be slowed from an atmospheric entry speed of 20,000km/h to 0.6 metres per second.
It is the fourth rover that Nasa has put on Mars, but the scope of the mission and the hardware involved are much greater than those in the past. Curiosity will climb out of the crater it landed in and will study rocks that were formed billions of years ago when the red planet still had had liquid water. It will also study rocks to see if Mars once supported life – even if it is microbial bacteria. Initially, the rover is funded for two Earth years of operations. But many expect this mission to roll and roll for perhaps a decade or more.
Scientists believe that this rover has the longevity and durability to do so much more than its predecessors. For starters, it has a plutonium battery, and is not solar-powered. It is also more robust, more flexible and has the benefit of a few decades of robotics technology advances than earlier rovers.
If the rover finds evidence that life once did exist on Mars, then the discovery would dwarf any other ever made by man. If there is evidence that life can exist on another planet, then it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. We might be able to start believing that there is definitely intelligent life out in one of the millions of galaxies in the universe. It is actually quite mind-boggling. It would mean that every facet of what we believe today would be turned on its head. We would not be alone.
We have put men on the moon and created space labs and space stations. We have sent probes out beyond our solar systems and space agencies are looking at the possibility of a manned mission to Mars. It is truly incredible. We are a curious species. We always have been. It is that curiosity that led us out of Africa on two legs and made us discover the world and develop our brains. Millions of years later, we find ourselves looking for life on other planets. ‘Curiosity’ is definitely a fitting name.