Will NASA's $2.5 billion Mars rover crash on Sunday?
Day by day, hour by hour, the tension is building. NASA鈥檚 mega-mission to Mars and delivery of the Curiosity rover could be a smashing success 鈥� or just smashing.
The Mars Science Laboratory鈥檚 1-ton is factory-equipped with science gear to delve into whether Mars ever was 鈥� or might be today 鈥� an eco-friendly setting able to sustain microbial life.
A through the planet鈥檚 atmosphere awaits the spacecraft. MSL鈥檚 Curiosity rover is scheduled to touch down at Gale Crater at 10:30 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 (1:30 a.m. EDT, 0530 GMT, Aug. 6).
At that moment, NASA鈥檚 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is to attempt imaging the final seconds of the robot's death-defying high dive.
"We will indeed be imaging the spot MSL is predicted to be about 60 seconds prior to landing, but the odds of capturing it are estimated at 60 percent," said Alfred McEwen at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is principal investigator of the orbiter's super-powerful High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). []
Opening the way forward
"The chips are really down on this one," said Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, which is dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of Mars.
"If it succeeds, it will be far and away the . It will make extraordinary scientific discoveries and fire the public's imagination with the vision of exploring another world," he told SPACE.com.
Zubrin said a successful touchdown of the Curiosity rover will display a never-tried-before landing system 鈥� a 鈥� capable of delivering 1,980 pounds (900 kilograms) to the Martian surface, which would be enough to accomplish the Mars sample return and other extraordinary missions.
"So it will not only point the way forward, it will open the way forward," Zubrin said.
Do or die
On the other hand, if the pancakes into the Red Planet, "it could take the entire Mars program down with it," Zubrin said. "With the 2016 and 2018 missions canceled, the program is in chaos, and as a result of government overspending outside of NASA, a drive for fiscal austerity is on the way."
Were the rover to fail, those who wished to get the 2016 and 2018 missions restored or propose new ones in their place wouldn鈥檛 stand a chance, Zubrin predicted. The failure, whatever its cause, would be denounced as obvious after the fact.
Zubrin said detractors would argue: "You didn't anticipate that? How could you not have foreseen that? We gave you $2 billion for your mission and you totally blew it. Don鈥檛 even think of asking us for any more."
As a bottom line, Zubrin said, "It is victory or death."
Gale Crater chemistry
The MSL mobile robot follows , which made a legged landing in May 2008 and investigated the northern polar region of the Red Planet.
Phoenix conducted science experiments for five months as part of NASA鈥檚 search for habitable zones in our solar system. Among its discoveries was the presence of water ice a few inches below the surface. In the Martian soil it also found perchlorate, which, when concentrated, lowers the freezing point of water below Martian temperatures; moreover, some microorganisms obtain energy from the substance.
"The Phoenix team keenly awaits the detailed analysis of the soil mineralogy and chemistry at Gale Crater near the equator to compare with the polar values that Phoenix found in close contact to an ice layer," said Peter Smith, leader of that mission at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
"Important questions on the history of volatiles and the fate of organics are yet to be answered sufficiently. 鈥uriosity has the ability to make major contributions," Smith told SPACE.com. "Curiosity represents the hard work of hundreds of dedicated individuals and builds on the return from all previous missions." []
Life on Mars: Cousin or alien?
While Curiosity is not a search-for-life mission, but rather a wheeled exploration for habitable environments, its work on Mars will help set the stage for future life-detection quests 鈥� and could move closer the day of the first footfall on the Red Planet.
"I feel like I鈥檓 kind of a minor stockholder in a much larger enterprise," said Kim Stanley Robinson, an American science fiction writer acclaimed for his award-winning trilogy "Red Mars," "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars."
Robinson spoke at Spacefest IV in June in Tucson, offering a look at the future of Mars exploration 鈥� but also waving a warning flag.
"It seems to me that we should not be using the analogy of Mars as the frontier or Wild West," Robinson said. He believes a complicated decision tree awaits those engaged in future Mars surveillance and the potential for finding of life there.
"If we find , either cousin or alien, it will still be one of the major findings in scientific history. And we鈥檒l have to consider how to study it 鈥hat kind of protocols we鈥檒l need to set up," Robinson said.
"It鈥檚 going to be an interesting problem," he told his Spacefest IV audience. "Can we satisfy ourselves as to whether there鈥檚 life on Mars 鈥� or not 鈥� without also contaminating it to the point where it becomes confusing to see whether that life we鈥檝e found there is indigenous or introduced by us?"
The hunt is going to be strange. It may be that life on is hunkered down deep and hard to find, Robinson said.
Can humans and Martian microbes co-inhabit? Robinson envisioned subterranean Mars life blissfully doing its thing while humans do their thing topside. "I think the most danger would be wrecking Mars life," Robinson said.
Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of last year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.
Copyright 2012 , a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
