Ivan Couronne -
Some 126 million km from Earth, alone on the immense and frigid Red Planet, a robot the size of a small 4x4 wakes up just after sunrise. And just as it has every day for the past six years, it awaits its instructions.
Around 9:30 Mars time, a message arrives from California.
“Drive forward 10 metres, turn to an azimuth of 45 degrees, now turn on your autonomous capabilities and drive.”
The Curiosity rover executes the commands, moving slowly to its designated position, at a maximum speed of 35 to 110 metres per hour.
Its batteries and other configurations limit its daily drive span to around 100 meters. The most Curiosity has rolled on Mars in a day is 220 metres.
Once it arrives, its 17 cameras take shots of its environs.
Its laser zaps rocks. Other tools on board drill into a particularly interesting rock to study small samples.
Around 5 pm Martian time, it will wait for one of NASA’s three satellites orbiting the planet to pass overhead.
Curiosity will then send several hundred megabytes of scientific data via large ground antennae to its human masters on Earth.
On the ground floor of building 34 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, scientists pore over Curiosity’s data every day at 1 pm.
The scientists are looking for any indication of life on Mars.
Inside Curiosity lies a “marvel of miniaturization,” says Charles Malespin, the deputy principal investigator for Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), a chemist’s lab the size of a microwave oven.
“It’s the most complicated instrument NASA has ever sent to another planet,” said Malespin.
SAM analyses samples of Martian soil by heating them in an oven that reaches 1,000 Celsius.
The hot rocks release gas, which is separated and analysed by instruments that offer a sample “fingerprint.”
At Goddard, Maeva Millan, a French postdoctoral researcher, compares this chemical fingerprint to experiments carried out on known molecules.
When they look similar, she can say, “Ah, that’s the right molecule.”
It is thanks to SAM that researchers know there are complex organic molecules on Mars.
And SAM has helped scientists learn that the Martian surface — geologically speaking — is far younger than previously thought.
On the other side of the United States, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, about two dozen men and women make up the team that drives Curiosity.
“My favourite part of the day (is when) I get to sit down and start looking at the imagery from Mars and understand where the rover currently is,” said Frank Hartman, who has driven both Curiosity and another, older rover, Opportunity.
The Mars drivers’ main job is to write the sequence of commands for the rover to follow the next sol, or “day” on Mars, which lasts 24 hours and nearly 40 minutes.
There is a delay whenever drivers realise something has gone wrong, whether it’s Opportunity getting buried by a Martian dust storm earlier this year, or one of Curiosity’s wheels getting pierced by a sharp rock.
“We always have to be aware of the fact that we know so little about what we’re encountering.”
As years pass, these scientist-drivers become attached to their robots. When Opportunity went silent after 14 years of tooling around on Mars, Hartman and his colleagues felt a sense of grief.
Opportunity “retired with honour,” said Hartman.
Curiosity, which landed in 2012, has so far travelled just over 19.75 km. It must wait another year before reaching its goal, Mount Sharp.
Then, a few months later, it will lose its Martian monopoly. Two rovers — one American and one European —
are scheduled to land on the planet in 2020. — AFP
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