Salon.com > Space Travel

“Seven minutes of terror”: The secret story of the Mars rover landing

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:02:00 +0000

The next major event in Curiosity's journal would be the landing. The center of the action on Earth would be JPL, where the signals would be received from the deep-space network antennae.

In comparison with the launch, landing on Mars is statistically far more risky. The Atlas V that powered the Curiosity rover up and away from Earth had a better than 95 percent success rate. In contrast, there had only been a total of six successful landings on Mars out of the many attempts by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the European Space Agency—a rate of well under 50 percent. NASA had not had any failures with its three Mars landings in the past decade, but the risk of crashing was formidable, and much greater than NASA would like to admit.

Married mission to Mars or: How to lose your spouse in 501 days

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 21:01:00 +0000

Not sure how to celebrate your anniversary this year, married couples of the world? Why not go on a bare-bones private mission to Mars, where you will spend 16 months in a closet-size space vessel drinking each other's sanitized urine?

If this sounds great to you, then millionaire and space tourist Dennis Tito is ready to help make it happen, according to the Associated Press.

The nonprofit foundation, Inspiration Mars, is currently raising money and hopes to fully fund the mission within five years.

The voyage will bring the married crew within 100 miles of the red planet, but will not land. So sorry, that means no time for a romantic spacewalk. But no matter: You will probably be too weak from malnourishment to do much walking, anyway. (Storage space is limited, so food must be kept to a minimum. Hence: Drinking your spouse's urine.)

"This is not going to be an easy mission," chief technical officer Taber MacCallum told the Associated Press. "We called it the Lewis and Clark trip to Mars." Adding, "It's a risk well worth taking."

NASA rover: Mars soil is just like Hawaii’s

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:19:00 +0000

NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars on Aug. 5, has performed the first in-depth analysis of soil on the Red Planet, Reuters reported.

According to David Bish, a researcher with Indiana University, the dirt is similar to the "weathered soils on the flanks of Mauna Kea in Hawaii,” Space.com reported.

In scientific terms, the soil is mineralogically similar to basaltic materials, with large amounts of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine, Reuters reported. About half the soil is non-crystalline material, such as volcanic glass.

“The mineralogy of Mars’ soil has been a source of conjecture until now," Curiosity scientist David Vaniman of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., said, according to Reuters. "This interest isn't just academic. Soils on planets' surfaces are a reflection of surface exposure processes and history, with information on present and past climates.”