Curiosity rover how does it work

It continues to explore the rock record from a time when Mars could have been home to microbial life. Launch Vehicle: Atlas V Landing: p. PDT, Aug. EDT, Aug. The car-size rover is about as tall as a basketball player and uses a 7 foot-long arm to place tools close to rocks selected for study. Curiosity's large size allows it to carry an advanced kit of 10 science instruments.

It has tools including 17 cameras, a laser to vaporize and study small pinpoint spots of rocks at a distance, and a drill to collect powdered rock samples. And as the public got caught up in the journey—from beer commercials to LEGO sets—so too did future members of the rover's mission team. Fraeman was in high school when Opportunity landed and was able to be at the JPL that night as part of an outreach event. Heather Justice, the rover's senior driver, also saw Opportunity as a touchstone.

When she was in high school in Maryland, she saw a documentary about the rovers. As Spirit stopped but the Opportunity mission went on, its human minders grew close. The children of mission scientists would hear of Opportunity almost as if the rover were a distant cousin. Pairs of rover drivers would spend so much time together, they'd practically read each other's minds.

A lot of life happens. Now, the team has six months to wrap up and archive the mission's data and otherwise wind down what for some has been a fixture of their lives for decades. This global mosaic of Mars is centered on Valles Marineris, the solar system's largest canyon range. It extends 4, kilometers and is seven kilometers deep in some places. While this may be the end for Opportunity, the study and exploration of Mars is far from over. The rover Curiosity is still chugging along, as are several Mars orbiters and the InSight lander.

The European and Russian space agencies are readying their own Mars rover, recently named Rosalind Franklin after the pioneering x-ray crystallographer. And many alumni from Spirit and Opportunity are hard at work on the upcoming Mars rover , which will search for signs of past life and cache rock samples for future return to Earth.

In the meantime, Opportunity will stand as a monument to science for hundreds of thousands of years—and maybe even a site where future explorers pay tribute. Perhaps in coming decades, humans will touch down in Meridiani Planum, Opportunity's landing area. Some scientists and engineers, including Seibert, have formally suggested the region as a landing site for crewed Mars missions. All rights reserved.

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Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs. Meet the people trying to help. Both the rovers share a few noteworthy features. They can both generate power from solar panels and store it in internal batteries. Just in case any little green men are nearby, the rovers can take high-resolution color images or bust out magnifying cameras for Earthbound scientists to scrutinize objects.

Multiple spectrometers on the arm of the rovers employ all sorts of tricks to determine the composition of rocks, including tracking how much heat an object is giving off and firing alpha particles at it.

Spirit and Opportunity also were equipped with an installed drill Rock Abrasion Tool to bore into the planet's surface. The body of the rover is called the warm electronic box WEB. An equipment deck sits on top of the rover, where the mast or periscope eye and cameras reside. The gold-painted walls of the rover's body are designed to withstand minus degrees F minus 96 degrees C temperatures. Inside the WEB of the rover are lithium ion batteries , radios and electronic things like spectrometers, all requiring warmth to function.

The brain of the rover is a computer that's comparable to a high-end, powerful laptop but with special memory functions that won't destruct with radiation and shut-offs. The computers also continually check temperatures to ensure a "healthy" rover. What Spirit and Opportunity found was a credit to the technology that allowed them to explore Mars. Within a couple months of landing, the Opportunity uncovered evidence of saltwater, which leaves open the possibility that life and fossil indications might at one time have existed on the planet.

Spirit stumbled across rocks that pointed to an earlier, unrulier Mars that was marked by impacts, explosive volcanism and subsurface water [source: NASA Mars ]. We're going to learn about some features and explorations of more recent rovers, but first let's slowly traverse to the next page and look at some of the equipment and science that Spirit and Opportunity have. First off, it must be noted that while Spirit hasn't transmitted any messages since , Opportunity was still clocking in work hours from Mars and sending information back to Earth in In fact, like any earthling, Opportunity scouts places to hole up for the winter in order to get the most solar energy stored in its batteries.

Just saying that Spirit and Opportunity have cameras and some fancy radio equipment really doesn't cut it. First of all, a panoramic camera is mounted on each rover to provide a larger geologic context.

Located on the mast about 5 feet 1. A miniature thermal emission spectrometer identifies minerals at the site with a little help from infrared wavelengths. It's used to find distinctive patterns that could show water movement. On the rover arm is a Moessbauer Spectrometer , which is placed directly on samples to find iron-bearing minerals, another tool to help determine how water has affected the soil and rock.

To determine the composition of rocks, an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer is used -- the same kind found in geology labs, which helps scientists determine origins and changes in the samples. The microscopic imaging tool can carefully investigate rock formation and variations. But how the heck do we get to actually find out about these amazing discoveries Spirit and Opportunity make? Well, it's not exactly your great-uncle's ham radio setup. While there's also a low-power and low-speed UHF radio with a meager data rate, it's primarily used as a backup, and at landing stage.

In general, the orbiters are only communicating about three hours of information directly to Earth. The rest is actually intercepted and sent to the orbiting Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor, which transmit to Earth -- and vice versa. The orbiter moves from horizon to horizon in about 16 minutes; 10 of those minutes can be used for communicating with the rovers [source: NASA ]. If we were to guess, about 10 megabytes of daily data can be sent to Earth.

This is especially helpful because orbiters are in closer contact with both the rovers, and have a much longer window to communicate with Earth than either rover. The rovers each use two antennas for communication: a high-gain antenna that can steer itself to beam information toward an antenna on Earth, and a low-gain antenna that can receive and send information from every direction at a lower rate than the high-gain antenna.

About 10 feet 3 meters long and 7 feet 2 meters high, the rover weighs about 2, pounds kilograms , and is designed with a "rocker" suspension that balances the vehicle over rocky Martian terrain.

While the rovers aren't exactly punching a clock every morning, they do send images, along with instrument and status data, back to their Earth bosses. Extrapolating from the data, the scientists send commands to the rover during the three-hour window of direct communication with the high-gain antenna.

The rover is then on its own for 20 hours, carrying out commands and sending image data to the two overhead satellites. The rover's commanders may tell it to move toward a new rock, grind a rock, analyze a rock, take photos or gather other data with other instruments. The rover and the scientists repeat this pattern for perhaps 90 days.

At that point, the rover's power will start diminishing. Also, Mars and Earth will be getting farther and farther apart, making communication more difficult. Eventually, the rover will not have enough power to communicate, will be too far away or will run into mechanical failure, and the mission will be over.

Our mission, however, is far from over. Let's take a trip to the next page where we'll learn all about the newest addition to the Mars exploration adventure. In November , NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory , which is designed to study soil and rock for organic compounds or conditions that could help us understand if Mars is -- or ever was -- able to support "habitability" of life on the planet.

The Mars Science Laboratory is actually a function of the rover Curiosity, which houses the scientific instruments that will collect and analyze samples.