Mars Rover ‘Curiosity’ Launched by NASA
Giant probe continues earlier rovers’ search for life on red planet with twice the gear and five times the weight.
| Posted Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011, at 12:52 PM ET
Photo by BRUCE WEAVER/AFP/Getty Images
Curiosity is the biggest and baddest mars probe yet, and she’s on her way to answer the age-old question: is there life on Mars?
NASA’s latest un-manned mission to the red planet launched Saturday morning from Cape Canaveral and is slated to land on Mars August 5, 2012. On board the 1-ton probe: a rock-vaporizing lazer, a giant drill, and a host of other instruments that will help scientists determine whether the planet does or ever did support life forms.
“It’s not your father’s rover,” Mars program director Doug McCuistion told the Orlando Sentinel. “It’s truly…the largest and most complex piece of equipment ever placed on the surface of another planet.”
The Jeep Wrangler-sized, six-wheel drive vehicle will be able to deal with mixed terrain and two-foot-high obstacles, a far cry from smaller rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which were sent to the planet in 2004.
Curiosity will make 354-million mile trip to search for evidence of water, oxygen and methane — important signifiers of life as we know it. It will also try and gather a wealth of information on how a human mission to the planet — proposed for a few decades in the future — might work.
It’s along way from Stephen Hawking’s Mars colonies, but NASA hopes a successful mission will help to secure Congressional funding and approval of further missions to the planet — a big question mark.
