Mars Rover: How a Self-Portrait Captured the Power of Curiosity

Mars Rover: How a Self-Portrait Captured the Power of Curiosity — page 1
A crowd in New York City’s Times Square celebrated as the rover Curiosity made its way to the surface of Mars in 2012 NASA invited the world to share the triumph or catastrophe of the mission as it was happening TV cameras at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL in Pasadena California beamed live images from mission control There team members wearing blue polo shirts sat at several rows of monitors Systems engineer Allen Chen was ready to narrate the coming events for both his team and audiences around the world Curiosity was almost at the end of its 345-million-mile 555-million-kilometer interplanetary voyage But the greatest challenge was ahead It had to survive a 7-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere and land safely I worked 10 years for seven minutes to go well 2 Chen said Would Curiosity survive the drop and land on its wheels ready to roam and explore Or would it suffer the fate of previous Mars missions which had shot past the planet crashed or simply stopped communicating Since 1960 more than half of all missions to the red planet had failed We’ve got literally seven minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars going from 13,000 miles an hour to zero in perfect sequence perfect choreography perfect timing 3 engineer Tim Rivellini said in a