Curiosity: The Complete Mission in Real-Time 3D
August 6, 2012
Experience the Curiosity mission of August 6, 2012: follow the spacecraft's real journey from Earth to Mars, down to the Gale Crater landing, in a real-time 3D reconstruction.
It's November 26, 2011.
At Cape Canaveral, Florida, an Atlas V rocket is about to leave for Mars.
It carries Curiosity, a 900-kilo rover the size of a small car.
Its mission: to find out whether Mars could ever have hosted life.
Total cost of the mission: 2.5 billion dollars.
Mars comes within reach only every 26 months. The 2011 window has just opened.
Liftoff. A Russian engine and four solid boosters lift 530 tonnes.
All that for 3.9 tonnes: the rover, its capsule and the stage that will fly it to Mars.
At 48 kilometres up, the four spent boosters fall away.
The fairing opens: a 4.5-metre capsule needed the widest one the Atlas has.
The first stage drops away. The Centaur upper stage lights for seven minutes.
Engine off: in orbit at 28,000 km/h, it will coast for twenty minutes.
It is not aiming at Mars, but at where Mars will be in eight months.
Earth already races around the Sun at 107,000 km/h, and Curiosity with it.
To climb out to the orbit of Mars, it only needs to add 12,000 km/h.
Over Africa, the Centaur relights for eight minutes.
Engine off at 40,000 km/h: Earth can no longer hold it back.
Curiosity parts from the Centaur and carries on alone.
Mars is still only a small red disc, 240,000 kilometres away.
No solar panels: the rover lives off the heat of 4.8 kilos of plutonium oxide.
On board, ten instruments, including a laser that vaporises rock seven metres away.
On the way, it measured the radiation an astronaut would take on this trip.
Its target: Gale Crater, 154 kilometres wide, perhaps an ancient lake.
At its centre, Mount Sharp, 5 km high: its layers tell the story of Mars.
Mars pulls it in: it is falling at 13,000 km/h, and speeding up.
A radio signal takes 14 minutes to get from here to Earth.
When word of entry reaches Earth, the rover will have been down, or lost, for seven minutes.
The cruise stage is cast off. Only the capsule and its heat shield remain.
Atmospheric entry at 21,000 km/h. Seven minutes left to stop.
In front of the heat shield, compressed air turns into glowing plasma.
A first at Mars: the capsule steers itself toward a zone 20 km by 7.
Parachute! It opens at 1,500 km/h: the air has already taken 93% of the speed.
Heat shield gone, it is still falling at 340 km/h: the air of Mars is too thin.
The rover and its descent stage drop from the capsule and light eight engines.
Too heavy for airbags, the rover is lowered on three cables.
Touchdown, 6 August 2012. Cables cut, the descent stage flies off to crash further away.
Its first drilled rock reveals it: this crater once held a freshwater lake.
It will also find organic molecules here, building blocks of the chemistry of life.
So Mars could have hosted life. What remains to learn is whether it did.
Planned for two years, it is still driving, climbing Mount Sharp layer by layer.