NASA rover Curiosity readies itself for Sunday night landing
Curiosity has begun a series of steps to ready itself to land on Mars, engineers said Saturday afternoon.
The NASA rover, which has been cruising toward Mars for eight months, starting a sequence of automated steps about 3 p.m. PDT in anticipation of its scheduled Sunday night landing.
The first two steps were to turn on Curiosity’s navigation system, using the Sun and stars to orient itself, and to begin to warm up the spacecraft’s powerful rocket engines, which will be used during the landing sequence.
“This makes it very real,” said Ravi Prakash, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge and a member of the entry, descent and landing team. “There’s nothing that’s going to stop us from landing now. We have to give it the best shot that we can, and that’s what we’re working toward in the next two days.”
The spacecraft will take many more steps to ready itself for landing. About five hours before landing, for instance, Curiosity will activate a suite of temperature and pressure sensors on the spacecraft’s heat shield.
Earlier Saturday, scientists said that Curiosity had gotten close enough to Mars--less than 3 million miles - that Mars’ gravity had begun to pull on the spacecraft and increase its speed.
The spacecraft had traveled 350 million miles and was cruising at roughly 8,000 mph Saturday. Mars’ gravitational pull will increase that speed to roughly 13,200 mph by the time the craft strikes the Martian atmosphere, about seven minutes before it lands.
-- Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times