PASADENA, Calif. — If you were packing for Mars, what would you bring?
NASA’s latest tourist, the roving robot named Curiosity, will lug around a suite of gadgets to snap pictures, sniff, taste and even drill. It will study the environment to figure out whether the giant crater where it is expected to land Sunday night ever possessed a habitable environment for microbial life.
The six-wheel, nuclear-powered rover is far more tech-savvy than anything that has landed before on the Red Planet. Here’s a glimpse of some of the cool things Curiosity can do:
It carries a laser that can zap a hole in rocks up to about 25 feet away and identify the chemical elements inside.
Its 7-foot-long robotic arm has a drill that can bore into rocks and soil. Like a scientist in a laboratory, it can transfer the ground-up powder to its onboard workbench to tease out minerals and sniff for organics, considered the chemical building blocks of life.
And what’s an extraterrestrial trip without a chance to sightsee? Curiosity promises to be a shutterbug, toting around a set of 2-megapixel color cameras that can beam panoramas back to Earth. With YouTube fans in mind, it also packed a video camera to record the last few minutes of its hairy descent to Mars.
Like Mars rovers before it, Curiosity carries a weather station to take daily temperature and pressure readings and record seasonal changes.
Even before landing, Curiosity has been doing experiments, tracking radiation during the 8½-month cruise to Mars. That should help NASA gauge radiation risk to future distance-traveling astronauts.
Green light to land on red planet
With only hours to go before a landing attempt, NASA says the nuclear-powered rover Curiosity appears on course. Tension will be high Sunday night when Curiosity plummets through the thin Martian atmosphere and attempts to set its six wheels down on the surface.
Crater things to come
The latest Mars destination is a giant crater near the equator with an odd feature: a mountain rising from inside.
How did it get there? Gale Crater was gouged by a meteor impact more than 3 billion years ago. Over time, scientists believe sediments filled in the 96-mile-wide crater and winds sculpted the 3-mile-high mountain, called Mount Sharp. Mount Sharp’s stack of rock layers can be read like pages in a storybook with older deposits at the base and more recent material the higher up you go, providing a record of Mars history through time.
