Gale provides a rich terrain for astro-biological experiments. In two years of roving, Curiosity will have travelled 12 miles horizontally and 4 miles vertically, up the gentle hill that the Gale crater encircles. The terrain is layered and will provide a lot of information regarding the past Martian geology and future potential for humans on Mars. By Chanden Sen As one of the speakers put it, the rover will relay back to us information that reads like an unfolding novel. In conclusion, The Mars Science Laboratory “Curiosity” as the chief scientist of NASA put it at the NASM conference, By the time you read this, and weather permitting, NASA the entire mission—-like all of NASA’s missions—-will ignite will have launched an exciting new rover bound for Mars in and bring to the surface the childlike excitement that we all felt late November 2011. The rover, atop an Atlas V541 rocket, is when we first gazed at the stars in the firmament above. slated to land on Mars sometime in August 2012. The name, Curiosity, given to the rover, was chosen through a naming And So On To Solar and Wind Power competition which 6-year old Clara Ma from Kansas, won. In the late 1990’s I wrote a letter to Kamal Nath, Curiosity is a bit like its predecessors, but differs in Environmental Minister at New Delhi. The letter was about the important ways. It is much bigger and carries a total of 10 river Ganges, which had become very polluted. The Hon. scientific experiments with a payload of 80 kilograms, almost Minister kindly wrote back, and I still have that letter 10 times that of the earlier Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. somewhere. The 6-wheeled Curiosity is chockfull of advanced equipment In the same vein, Al Gore writes that we humans pollute the which almost reads like science fiction. The electric power, for atmosphere to the tune of 90 million tons of greenhouse gases, example, of 100-125 watts, will be delivered, not from solar daily. If that number doesn’t scare you, it should. Granted, the cells, but from an RTG unit, or Radio-isotope Thermo-electric atmosphere is huge, but it is a finite entity. There’s only so Generator. As the name suggests, Plutonium 238 is allowed to much that it can take without changing its composition and decay naturally within an onboard reactor, and the heat properties. released drives a thermo-electric unit. The coal, oil, and natural gas industry, with their huge The onboard, radiation-hardened computer is the RAD600, financial resources, even today deny that burning fossil fuels which operates at 400 MIPS, or million instructions per second. can pollute the atmosphere. According to them, believing in The computer has 256 MB of DRAM and a 2GB flash drive. If global warming is like believing in a flat earth. Ha! Ha! these specifications don’t look too impressive, one has to Some decades ago, the well-entrenched and well-heeled remember that weight and power consumption, not to talk of tobacco industry was busy denying that smoking could cause reliability, are prime considerations in space. There are two lung cancer. Now, thank heavens, we all know better. onboard RAD600’s of which one is a standby or back up unit. In the late 1960’s, when I used to cycle to St. Xavier’s College There are 17 cameras in all on Curiosity. Some are mounted along the streets of Calcutta, I could feel my eyes smarting from at the corners of the rover, and one is at the highest point in the car exhaust fumes. Those were the days before cars were chassis. There is a NAVCAM, or navigation camera, and a required to have emission control units. The problem has been HAZCAM or hazard avoidance camera. reduced but not totally eliminated. The silent foe, carbon Among the 10 astro-biological experiments that Curiosity dioxide, is still being spewed from cars, trucks, buses and coal supports, some are from Germany and Russia. To give you an and oil fired generating stations. idea of the technology used, one experiment involves training According to one expert, the term “clean coal” is a myth. Coal an infra-red laser beam on a rock up to 7 meters away, firing a cannot be economically cleaned and large-scale carbon capture short laser burst, and spectroscopically analyzing the light flash and sequestration experiments have not really succeeded to an produced by the vaporized sample of rock. This has the name extent worth shouting about. LISA, or Laser Induced Spectroscopic Analysis. Yet the coal industry touts “clean coal” as the silver bullet of The Curiosity has a flexible arm which can drill into a rock energy production. It’s just one more attempt to hoodwink the up to 5 cm depth, collect the sample dust, and fold back to public and keep their decades-old power stations up and deposit it into one of 74 tiny buckets for further analysis. running. True, solar power and windmills have some issues of If you remember, the earlier Spirit rover landed on Mars their own. Firstly, the strongest sunlight happens to shine in cocooned in air-bags. Well, this design would not work for the desert areas, far from population centers. much bigger Curiosity, hence the final landing on Mars will This means that long transmission lines have to be laid, an actually be on the 6 out stretched wheels of the rover itself. added cost. Secondly, if you consult a map of feasible windBefore that, while still a few thousand feet from the Martian power regions of the United States, ie, where the wind speed is surface, Curiosity will be lowered from its capsule by cables, a at least 15 mph, you will see that much of the Western US is never-before tried maneuver. Once Curiosity lands, the rest of very promising, while the East, such as North Carolina, is not the unit higher up will shoot away to land at least a few so. hundred feet from Curiosity, so that it does not contaminate any samples that are chosen to be analyzed. continued on page 118 In a fascinating discussion at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, five top scientists and technologists Chandan Sen involved in the upcoming mission spoke enthusiastically about Contact: some of the salient points of the mission. chandansen33@hotmail.com The site chosen for Curiosity to explore – called the Gale crater – is one of four sites short-listed from literally hundreds of possible sites after inputs from 300 scientists worldwide. Saathee.com
48
December 2011