New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time

wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."

Comments

Wheels

[theshowmecanuck]

I've always wondered why the rovers aren't designed with bigger wheels and bubble-ish tires (not saying they have to be inflated) like on a truck outfitted for work in a swamp. Every time we read that one of the existing rovers got stuck and the folks at JPL were working on getting it unstuck, I'd think the same thing.

Re:Wheels

[Digicrat]

Me thinks there is something wrong with that picture. *ALL* of them are wearing dust suits and walking around on static mats. Im sorry it is going to be sitting outside in a rather harsh environment. If you need to take that amount of care now perhaps there is something wrong? I can understand taking care building it but that makes me think it will fail later on when put in a mars dust storm.

The reason for the bunny suits at this stage is NOT to protect it against damage from dust, but to prevent contamination. If we're sending a probe to another planet to search for traces of life, the last thing we want is to "discover" life that we brought with us in the first place. Hence all spacecraft (or rover) components are handled in the most sterile of environments.

The mats in those photos are probably to ensure it doesn't roll over any lingering dust on the floor and to mark where people (in bunny suits) shouldn't work, I doubt those are actually anti-static mats, or if they are if that's the main purpose in there.

Re:Wheels

[ThatMegathronDude]

rubber is a complex polymer that degrades on exposure to UV. the radiation background in transit and on the surface of Mars spells certain doom for the kind of rubber you see in tires.

Re:Overweaning care

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you don't quite understand the utter, sheer enormity of a project like sending a probe to another planet, let alone an autonomous rover to land on the surface. As you yourself admit, this thing is going to travel hundreds of millions of kilometres through space, burn through an atmosphere, land on the surface of a planet and -hopefully- roll away into the sunset. NASA can't test it enough IMHO. This machine needs to have triple redundancies built in - it will need them. Watch the video: this thing is going to explore the surface of another planet. Who is going to fix it, if it breaks?

There's no thing like overweaning care when it comes to real, actual space exploration. If you don't take care, you can see a rover worth a few hundred million dollars burn up in an atmosphere or worse: just sitting there like a lame duck because someone thought it'd be a waste of time to take the appropriate care.

Re:Overweaning care

[by (1706743)]

Ah sorry, amend my previous figure...to $80,000/pound.

Dang, I knew the dollar was down against the pound, but that's just ridiculous.

Re:You guys have replaced me already?

[Jogar the Barbarian]

http://xkcd.com/695/