 |
Discover news, videos and much more based on what your friends are reading and watching. Publish your own activity and retain full control.
"Once you get there, think how exhilarating it would be,womens boots," he said. "You would be discovering a new planet."
Also ReadThe Saturday launch window opens at 10:02 a.m. ET,asics gel nimbus, and there are daily opportunities after that until Dec. 18. NASA said today the weather is 70 percent go for launch from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, just south of the launch pads from which space shuttles left for 30 years,ティンバーランド 黒,コーチ レザー, and before them, Apollo moon missions.
Curiosity weighs one ton and is much too heavy to land on airbags like NASA's previous rovers,moncler jacket for women, Spirit and Opportunity. So it will be slowed by a heat shield and parachute, then gently lowered to the planet's surface on cables suspended from a rocket-powered sky crane. It is the first time this design is being used, and mission managers have openly confessed they're uneasy.
Astronaut Mike Gerhardt is testing concept rovers and systems that could be used by explorers on Mars. A 900 day mission? He would go in a heartbeat.
Related articles：- http://www.virvil.com/members/home
- http://ceramicschina.biz/plus/view.php?aid=1259550
- http://www.99hr.net/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=1337092&extra=
Curiosity is set for a nearly nine-month trip to the Red Planet. Getting there is only the start; when the spacecraft plows into the thin Martian atmosphere,moncler jacket uk, that's where the spacecraft designers will be tested.
Mars is a harsh mistress. Of 38 missions we earthlings have sent there since the beginning of the space age, NASA counts 24 failures. The Russians have never yet had a full success.
The failures are legendary -- including the latest, Russia's Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which is currently stuck in Earth orbit after it launched earlier this month. Phobos-Grunt was an ambitious mission to land a robotic probe on one of Mars's moons,doudounes moncler, Phobos ("Grunt" is Russian for "ground"),ugg オーストラリア, and scoop up soil to return to Earth. Scientists were thrilled with the prospect of testing samples in labs around the world. Now engineers are talking about when the doomed spacecraft will crash back to Earth, probably in late December or early January.
Getting to Mars is time-consuming partly because of the way our planets orbit. Rice University's Dr. Patricia Reiff jokes she thinks sometimes Mars doesn't want us there.
This mission, if it succeeds, will answer questions for NASA scientists who are planning to send humans to Mars, some day. How would a manned mission work?
Curiosity,コーチ 時計, hopefully, will avoid Phobos-Grunt's fate. If all goes well, it will land on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012.
"The key is pre-deploying spacecraft and rovers -- getting infrastructure in place to make the most of the time we have to explore the planet," said Bret Drake of NASA's Human Space Flight Team.
Mars Rover Curiosity Launched and Heading for Mars (ABC News)
Drake said we just won't know enough to go to Mars for another 30 years. It would take 180 days to get to Mars, 180 days to get back, and the astronauts would spend 500 days exploring the planet. The logistics are daunting. Problems like protecting astronauts from the radiation found in interplanetary space have yet to be solved.
"Even though it is relatively close to Earth, its orbit is one and a half astronomical units, where we are at one," she said. "Because the orbits are so nearly the same we only line up every two years, so we only have a good opportunity to fly to Mars every two years. That just makes it tricky navigationally."
Yahoo!. Now with Friends.It is the most ambitious and complex robotic rover built to explore the Red Planet. The goal: find elements that could prove whether life ever existed on Mars.
Mars beckons space age explorers,シャネル コレクション, much as the New World lured Christopher Columbus. NASA answers the siren call again Saturday -- launching the $2.5 billion nuclear-powered Mars Science Laboratory, nicknamed Curiosity.
Related articles：
