So yesterday the new Mars Science Laboratory – common name Curiosity – blasted off towards Mars where it will hopefully arrive sometime in August 2012.
image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity is a rover much bigger than anything that has been sent before, dwarfing Spirit and Opportunity and especially Sojourner. It weighs in at about 1 ton and is about the size of a small SUV. The interesting thing about this mission is that it is a definite search for signs of life – not to prove that there was water, or to look for interesting rocks, but a bona fide life hunt. Having said that, the rover carries no instruments that will detect actual life forms, instead carrying a range of instruments (that together constitute a fairly impressive mobile robotic laboratory) that will look for signs of organic matter and signs that Mars was capable of supporting organic life.
The rover carries the following range of instruments:
Cameras:
Mast Camera (Mastcam), Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), Mars Descent Imager (MARDI)
Spectrometers:
Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam), Chemistry & Mineralogy X-Ray Diffraction/X-Ray Fluorescence Instrument (CheMin), Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) Instrument Suite
Radiation Detectors:
Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD), Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN)
Environmental Sensors:
Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS)
Atmospheric Sensors:
Mars Science Laboratory Entry Descent and Landing Instrument (MEDLI)
I’ll go into more detail about the specific instruments in future posts, once I’ve worked out which ones are most relevant to a ‘Proxy’ type project. Meanwhile the most comprehensive overview of the mission is obviously at NASA’s site here
