To document and comprehend the purpose, discoveries, and life of the Curiosity rover, and how it contributed to analysing the habitability for life on Mars.
Introduction
In 1993, NASA founded the Mars Exploration Program to explore Mars, and find out if Mars could ever support life. On June 10th and July 7th of 2003, two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were launched into space, to explore planet Mars. They arrived on Mars on January 2004, and made many discoveries during their time on the planet, such as evidence of salt water, many hills, and plenty of terrain. In 2009, Spirit was lost to martian sand and was abandoned two years later, while Opportunity was lost to a global-scale dust storm, covering the rover’s solar panels in 2018. While the rovers were certainly successful missions, collectively sending back 250,000 images, a more advance and newer rover was created. This newer model was created to closer evaluate the habitability of the planet, which meant the model had to study the climate and geology. This led to the creation of the Curiosity rover, launched into space on November 26, 2011.
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Purpose and goals
The Main goals of Rover, and the Mars Exploration Program are to primarily discover if the planet could ever have life on it, however there are many other goals.
Biological goals include discovering the nature and amount of organic compounds containing carbon, investigating if the ‘chemical compounds of life’ are present (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur) and identifying features that may show evidence of past biological processes. The Geological and geochemical goals included discovering what chemical, isotopic and mineralogical compositions make up the martian surface, and understanding how modified rocks and solids have been formed. Planetary Process goals involved assessing longtime Martian atmospheric evolution and determining the
cycling of water and carbon dioxide on the planet. The last goal is to measure the surface radiation of the planet, and radiation of the spacecraft interior during the trip to Mars.
Devices and specifications of rover
Curiosity, being the size of a car, weights in at 3893 Kilograms. The rover is powered by a radioisotope thermometric generator (RTG) which produces energy from the decay of radioactive isotopes, such as plutonium. The resulting heat from the decay is made into electricity by thermocouples. This is an improvement from the last rovers, which utilised sun power through solar panels, which was intimately the downfall of one and a hindrance to both.
The rover has two on-board computers, called Rover Compute Elements. These computers run VxWorks, a real time operating system built from the ground up, even having it’s own kernel. The Memory on the computers includes 256 kB (kilobytes) of Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-only memory (EEPROM), 256 MB (Megabytes) of DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) and 2 GB (Gigabytes) of flash memory. All of the memory is radiation hardened to prevent radiation damage. They also feature a single core RAD750 processors, which are radiation hardened processors capable of handling 400 MIPS (Millions of instructions per second). The rover is fitted with two computers as one of them serves as a backup, which was utilised, when in February 28, 2013, an issue occurred in the flash memory of the first computer causing the computer to boot continuously in a loop, forcing NASA to use the backup. These computers are responsible for self-monitoring to keep the rover operational, such as measuring temperatures. They are also responsible for taking pictures, driving, and operating the instruments.
The rover also features an X band transmitter and receiver that can communicate with earth, and a UHF electra-lite software-defined radio that can communicate with Mars orbiters. Communication with orbiters is the main path for data to return to earth, as orbiters allow for faster transmission speeds. The rover has six 50 cm wheels with rocker-bogie suspension. The suspension also serves as the landing system. The rover also carries 17 cameras, all of which are of high resolutions. The rover can use them to send back photos and scan the surface for interesting details, which a small portion of which is vaporised by an infrared laser and examine the resulting spectra signature. If it is intriguing, the rover utilises its long arm and holds a microscope, and an x-ray spectrometer. If it still requires more analysis, the rover can actually drill the object, and deliver a sample to the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) inbuilt into the rover, or the Chemistry and Mineralogy instruments located on the rover. The MastCam, Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and mars decent imager (MARDI) are all cameras created by Malin Space Science Systems. There are a total of 17 high resolution cameras.
The landing at Mars
The rover was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2100 and landed on Mars on August 6, 2012. The landing of the rover at Mars was so stressful employees of NASA dubbed it “seven minutes of terror”. The rover swapped over to a landing configuration while the attached spacecraft lowered the rover under the spacecraft descent stage, with a 20 Meter ‘sky crane’. This was for a soft, wheel first landing on the surface of Mars. After two seconds on Mars ground, it activated many pyrotechnic fasteners activating cable cutters to free itself from the attached spacecraft. The Rover was now on Mars.
Discoveries
The Rover has contributed to many discoveries, including identifying high amounts of radiation on Mars. From the results, NASA states astronauts could tolerate the radiation for a long term mission to Mars without accumulating high doses of radiation. The rover also managed to discover evidence supporting the idea that Mars could have once had a lake with neutral pH, not being too salty. Scientists believe this is because Mars may have once had a thick and dense atmosphere, trapping heat. The atmosphere Mars has today is not strong enough to hold much heat, causing low temperatures. This is because a sample drilled from a John Klein rock contained Clay minerals, suggesting an aqueous environment. Many key chemical ingredients for life has been found in rock sampled drilled from the planet, including nitrogen, sulfur, hydrogen, oxygen and phosphorus. Other chemical ingredients such as benzene and propane have also been discovered. Temperatures averages of negative 60 degrees to negative 125 degrees Celsius have also been observed. Large spikes of methane with concentrations of 21 parts per billion have also been discovered on Mars, with no clear source, except that it occurs in an unknown seasonal pattern. This is small compared to earth’s air sample containing 1865ppb of methane. The source is not even known if it’s biological, geological, or even ancient or modern.
Conclusion
The Mars rover Curiosity overall was a major success, making many discoveries and serving as the basis of the 2020 rover, and being one of the top most successful rovers sent to Mars. The rover is not only a pathway to future discoveries and development, but a testament to the technological achievements of today. The rover has made many fascinating discoveries, and will continue to do so.
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