According to the US space agency, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is all set to land on the red planet in August. Engineers are working on the software and procedures now to prepare for the touchdown.
The 900kg robot is eyeing 6 August as the landing date and is planning to land closer to the mountain the scientists planned earlier. "We're trimming the distance we'll have to drive after landing by almost half," said Pete Theisinger, Mars Science Laboratory project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "That could get us to the mountain months earlier," he added. The rover has been programmed to land in a near-equatorial depression on Mars, known as Gale Crater.
Controllers working on the plan have drawn a smaller landing eclipse on the planet. They believe they can hit the target without any problem because of the high-precision landing system attached to the rover. Currently, the engineers are working on a problem with the rover's drill that might contaminate the rock samples gathered for research.
"We are gaining a greater understanding of that contamination issue," John Grotzinger, the rover project scientist from the California Institute of Technology, said in a teleconference. "The testing so far continues to give us reasonable confidence we'll be able to meet all the mission success criteria for the use of the drill." The main goal of this $2.5 billion mission is to determine if the environment in there is suitable enough for microbial life. Another goal of this mission is to find the organic building blocks of life using the technologies sent to Mars.
Grotzinger also revealed that this is the first time a Mars rover is carrying a drill. "We don't have enough information yet to really know how serious the problem is," he said, adding, "We see so many potential ways to work around this that we could use."
"From the moment of landing it will be about 14 minutes before we will get a confirmation signal back to Earth at the earliest to confirm that we are actually down safely on the surface," Dave Lavery, the program executive said. He believes there is never a guarantee of success as 40 percent of missions to Mars have been successful so far.
