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NASA’s latest Mars rover is scheduled to land at Gale Crater on the Red Planet at 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT or 6:31 a.m. GMT on Aug. 6).
The long-awaited event has followed sequence so far since the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft lifted off last November.
But how Curiosity fares during the entry, descent, and landing, dubbed the “seven minutes of terror” by NASA, will determine the success of the mission.
Because it is more than 120 million miles away, the communication time delay means NASA will have no contact with or control over the craft while it decelerates from 13,000 miles per hour to a soft touchdown using the largest-ever supersonic parachute, an array of pyrotechnic devices, and a rocket-powered sky crane.
The scientists will transmit their last command two hours before landing, and Curiosity will send back an alert as it enters the Martian atmosphere. However, this will take 14 minutes to reach Earth, by which time Curiosity will have already been on the surface for seven minutes.
So there will be no live footage of the landing, but if all goes to plan, the one-ton rover will film the final few minutes of its descent and immediately start sending back imagery of the Red Planet for all to see.
“A set of low-resolution gray scale Hazcam images will be acquired within minutes of landing on the surface,” said Justin Maki at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release.
“Once all of the critical systems have been checked out by the engineering team and the mast is deployed, the rover will image the landing site with higher-resolution cameras.”
As the mission progresses, Curiosity’s assortment of cameras and science instruments will look for organic molecules and help determine whether the Red Planet once had environmental conditions suitable for microbial life.
Watch this interactive simulation of Curiosity during the “seven minutes of terror”
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