Mission control reports Curiosity is safe on the surface of Mars!!! Images from Odyssey orbiter and rover coming in! Images will be posted here!
The moment of truth is close at hand. Curiosity will soon enter the Martian stratosphere. The Internet is abuzz with excitement and no small amount of anxiety. The seven minutes of terror are about to begin for real. There's a lot riding on it, both literally and figuratively. Some good links to keep tabs on are Mars Google Hangout (This has been a lot of fun tonight), NASA interactive event schedule, JPL TV, and NASA TV. And last but certainly not least, check out Palantir's live blog here.
To understand the importance of this mission – and Curiosity is about as important a science experiment as we’ve ever created – let’s take a quick peek at the fascinating history of our solar system’s most hospitable world, outside of the one we call home. Afterall, you have this much time to kill...
Many experts think that Mars was once a very different place than it is today. Both the earth and Mars had mostly taken shape by 4.5 billion years ago. Both had accreted out of the solar nebula swirling around our nascent sun. The sun was smaller and dimmer then, earth and Mars were probably covered in thick clouds belched up by the prodigious residual heat of planetary formation. It likely took tens of millions of years before a stable, solid surface congealed on either world. But cool they did, and eventually both planets begin collecting liquid water on their respective surfaces.
That's when paleobiologists believe the first simple replicating organisms developed on earth – it had to happen pretty quick. The earliest marine sediments we have found on earth, dating to about 3.8 BYA, already show geochemical signatures consistent with widespread colonies of chemosynthetic bacteria. If the conditions on Mars were the same, it’s reasonable to infer that there might have been life in the oceans of that planet, too. But there were big changes in the air for Mars.
Planetary scientists believe the molten iron core of Mars cooled many times faster than earth's, which makes sense; Mars is a much smaller planet, which means a greater amount of surface area to volume and less insulation between the hot core and the cooling surface, so it would radiate internal heat much faster into the infinite cold sink of space than a larger planet. Once that core began setting like cement, the Martian oceans were doomed. The great internal dynamo deep inside seized up. Mars lost its protective magnetic field, and nothing stood between the harsh solar wind and the Martian atmosphere.
Models suggest that the atmosphere would be stripped away quickly, in a few hundred million years at the most. As the ambient pressure dropped and the sun beat down, the oceans would first evaporate and then sublimate. Water vapor rose high into the Martian sky where it was broken down into constituent oxygen and hydrogen by unfiltered UV. The lighter hydrogen quickly escaped, the reactive oxygen left behind combined with any elements at hand. Carbon became CO2, iron and other minerals in the drying valleys oxidized. In as little as a billion years after its birth as a warm, wet world, Mars was transformed into the bone dry, frozen rusty planet we see today.
The great drying: Mars as it may have appeared billions of years ago on the left and Mars as it appears today far right
But how wet and warm was Mars? How long did that youthful blush last? Did Martian life gain a brief foothold only to be cruelly snuffed out? Or, if so, did some hardy organisms survive the eons, perhaps below the surface where the last remnants of precious water remain? Those are some of the questions this mission will shed light on.
Curiosity is a one ton, self-propelled all-terrain vehicle bristling with scientific instruments powered by a heart of dying plutonium. Curiosity is not specifically designed to
find life, it is designed to find the conditions and ingrediants
for life. Its eyes can see in wavelengths invisible to our own, its ears can pick out subtle whispers in the midst of a screaming sand storm; it can virtually sniff Martian air and taste Martian soil. The rover even comes equipped with drills for boring into solid rock and magnifying glasses to peer deeply into the liberated material. And it is landing in one of the best places possible to do this: Gale Crater.
Gale is a one-hundred mile wide scar punched deep into low laying Martian bedrock more than 3 billion years ago by a spacerock about as large as the dino killer that hit us at the end of the Cretaceous. In the crater's center is a big pile of what looks like sedimentary debris, three miles high and so vast it can be seen from telescopes in earth orbit. If there were sizable oceans on Mars this region would have held one of the deepest. If there are sedimentary strata revealing clear signs of warm, salty water, the crater walls and central mountains will reveal it like pages in an ancient diary. If life persisted into the great drying, their final stand may be preserved here. And if there are even now organisms eking out a living, or in freeze dried stasis waiting for summer rains that will never come, this would be an ideal place to find them.
But that technology comes at a cost, both in dollars and payload. Curiosity weighs about ten times as much as the heaviest rover ever sent to Mars. Therein lays tonight's adventure: the method used to safely land Spirit and Opportunity, a combination of parachutes and big crash balloons that bounced over the Martian terrain like giant beach balls, will not work. Engineers had to come up with something revolutionary. What they came up with is gripping ...
The rover is so far away light takes long minutes to get from there to here. But it's not completely alone. Two spacecraft already orbiting Mars, the MRO and the Odyssey, have been retasked to help cover EDL. MRO will have a perfect view of entry and will pass almost directly over the landing site right as the skycrane is unhooking and unspooling the rover (See NASA video). Odyssey will pass overhead just a few minutes later and act as a relay station -- the LZ will not be facing earth at that time. Needless to say mission control will be glued to MRO and Odyssey's commlinks, the two orbiters will be sending back signals as each mini milestone is reached.
If Curiosity crashes all over Gale Crater taxpayers are out a billion two billion plus dollars and, thanks to shortsighted budget cuts, it could set back exploration of Mars by decades. But oh baby, if Curiosity succeeds the EDL team will become legend, NASA will produce the most amazing pictures ever taken of any planet outside of the one we're sitting on, and humanity may well stand on the precipice of the greatest discovery in history.
We'll know if that worked or not at 10:31 PM Pacific Time, 1:31 AM Eastern.
[UPDATE] Telemetry data coming through from Odyssey. This could mean that we'll get some info right away on Curiosity's arrival. Or not. 7 Minutes of Terror underway!
SAFE ON MARS!