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TOPIC: Mars Science Laboratory mission
Blobrana


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Madrid Event Marks Spain's Role in Next Mars Mission

Spain is providing a key science instrument and the high-gain antenna communication subsystem for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, on track for launch this year.
At a small ceremony held March 17, 2011, in Madrid, representatives of the United States and Spain signed an agreement for cooperation on the mission. Signers included Alan D. Solomont, U.S. ambassador to Spain; Arturo Azcorra, director general of Spain's Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology; and Jaime Denis, director general of Spain's National Institute for Aerospace Technology. Spain's Minister of Defence Carme Chacon Piqueras and Minister of Science and Innovation Cristina Garmendia Mendizabal were also present.
The Mars Science Laboratory instrument provided by Spain is the Remote Environmental Monitoring Station, which will measure daily and seasonal changes in weather using sensors on the mast, on the deck and inside the mission's rover. The rover's high-gain antenna will send and receive communications directly between the rover and Earth, using X-band radio transmissions.

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Blobrana


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Advanced NASA Instrument Gets Close-up on Mars Rocks

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, will carry a next generation, onboard "chemical element reader" to measure the chemical ingredients in Martian rocks and soil. The instrument is one of 10 that will help the rover in its upcoming mission to determine the past and present habitability of a specific area on the Red Planet. Launch is scheduled between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011, with landing in August 2012.
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Blobrana


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NASA Mars Rover Will Check for Ingredients of Life

Paul Mahaffy, the scientist in charge of the largest instrument on NASA's next Mars rover, watched through glass as clean-room workers installed it into the rover.
The specific work planned for this instrument on Mars requires more all-covering protective garb for these specialized workers than was needed for the building of NASA's earlier Mars rovers.
The instrument is Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, Md. At the carefully selected landing site for the Mars rover named Curiosity, one of SAM's key jobs will be to check for carbon-containing compounds called organic molecules, which are among the building blocks of life on Earth. The clean-room suits worn by Curiosity's builders at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are just part of the care being taken to keep biological material from Earth from showing up in results from SAM.
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Blobrana


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Curiosity rover
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A rock-zapping laser instrument on NASA's next Mars rover has roots in a demonstration that Roger Wiens saw 13 years ago in a colleague's room at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on the rover Curiosity can hit rocks with a laser powerful enough to excite a pinhead-size spot into a glowing, ionised gas. ChemCam then observes the flash through a telescope and analyses the spectrum of light to identify the chemical elements in the target.
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Blobrana


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Curiosity Cam
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Mars Rover Construction Webcam Tops Million Viewers

More than one million people have watched assembly and testing of NASA's next Mars rover via a live webcam since it went online in October.
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Blobrana


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Camera on Curiosity's Arm will Magnify Clues in Rocks

NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, will wield an arm-mounted magnifying camera similar to one on the Mars Rover Opportunity, which promptly demonstrated its importance for reading environmental history from rocks at its landing site in 2004.
Within a few weeks after the landing, that camera at the end of Opportunity's arm revealed details of small spheres embedded in the rocks, hollows where crystals had dissolved, and fine layering shaped like smiles. These details all provided information about the site's wet past.
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Curiosity Cam

Look inside the clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to watch the next Mars rover being built.
The camera is located in a viewing gallery above the clean room floor.

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Blobrana


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What will the Martian atmosphere be like when the next Mars rover descends through it for landing in August of 2012?
An instrument studying the Martian atmosphere from orbit has begun a four-week campaign to characterize daily atmosphere changes, one Mars year before the arrival of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity. A Mars year equals 687 Earth days.
The planet's thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide is highly repeatable from year to year at the same time of day and seasonal date during northern spring and summer on Mars.
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Blobrana


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Curiosity Rover Grows by Leaps and Bounds

Talk about a growth-spurt. In one week, Curiosity grew by approximately 1 meter when spacecraft technicians and engineers attached the rover's neck and head (called the Remote Sensing Mast) to its body. At around 2 meters tall, the next rover to Mars now stands head and shoulders above the rest.
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Blobrana


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Curiosity rover
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Video Camera Will Show Mars Rover's Touchdown

A downward-pointing camera on the front-left side of NASA's Curiosity rover will give adventure fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars.
The Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will start recording high-resolution video about two minutes before landing in August 2012. Initial frames will glimpse the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover, revealing a swath of Martian terrain below illuminated in afternoon sunlight. The first scenes will cover ground several kilometres across. Successive images will close in and cover a smaller area each second.
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