Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Fernando Abilleira
Saint Louis University Parks College graduate helps land NASA’s $2.5 billion Curiosity rover on Mars. At 10:32 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5, 2012, more than eight months after launching on a rocket from Cape Canaveral, NASA’s 8,463pound Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft completed its journey through the void of space and successfully delivered the car-sized Curiosity rover to the surface of Mars. The precision of its landing was unprecedented in the history of space travel. After traveling nearly 350 million miles, the Mars Science Laboratory roared into the thin Martian atmosphere at speeds topping 13,000 mph. Next, in the span of just seven minutes, it deployed a supersonic parachute, jettisoned a heat shield and fired retro rockets that slowed the vehicle to less than 2 mph. Then, a first-of-its-kind sky crane system gently lowered Curiosity’s wheels onto the surface of the Red Planet. The robotic spacecraft had been placed just one-and-ahalf miles from the center of its target at the bottom of Gale Crater, between the crater’s wall and 3-mile-high mountain known as Mount Sharp. “The vehicle performed flawlessly,” said Fernando Abilleira (Parks ’99, ’01), 35, trajectory lead and a member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories Curiosity navigation team responsible for delivering the spacecraft to the optimal point on the top of the Martian atmosphere required to accurately land inside Gale Crater.
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Abilleira’s team designed an innovative entry guidance system that allowed the Mars Science Laboratory to decide in real time, based on pre-loaded software, how to maneuver through the atmosphere. “From atmospheric entry to landing, the vehicle went into six different spacecraft configurations and 76 pyrotechnic devices were fired,” said Abilleira. “If this complex sequence of events had not worked perfectly, the mission would have been over. There was no margin for error.” The touchdown of Curiosity was the culmination of a $2.5 billion project that NASA began planning a dozen years ago. Abilleira joined the team in 2007 as a mission design engineer and trajectory analyst. As the trajectory lead during launch, cruise, approach and surface operations, one of his primary responsibilities was to design and optimize the launch period for this historic Fernando Abilleira (Parks ’99, ’01) with the test rover.
spacecraft, which, with its payload of scientific instruments, was five times heavier than any other previously delivered to Mars. On the evening of Aug. 5, the mood in the JPL mission control room was tense but confident. “We knew we had done everything we could to maximize the chances for success,” Abilleira said. “It was time to watch the spacecraft do its job. Fortunately, the entire entry, descent and landing sequence was executed like clockwork. It was amazing.” The entry, descent and landing on the Martian surface may have happened as scripted, but not before the team gathered in the control room and endured what they have semi-affectionately called, “Curiosity’s seven minutes of terror.” “The successful descent of the spacecraft from the top of the atmosphere into Gale Crater took about seven minutes,” explained