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NASA's Next Mars Rover
An anonymous reader writes "In August 2012, the NASA rover Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on the surface of Mars. The size of a small car, it's four times as heavy as predecessors Spirit and Opportunity, and comes with a large robot arm, a laser that can vaporise rocks at seven meters, a percussive drill and a weather station. Oh, and 4.8kg of plutonium-238. Wired has some high-resolution photographs from lab that is putting the next rover together."
Curiosity's destination on Mars has reportedly been chosen: Gale Crater. The 150-kilometer wide depression 'includes a tantalizing 5-kilometer-high mound of ancient sediments, [and] may have once been flooded by water.' The Planetary Society blog has a couple of additional pictures and a time-lapse video of the delicate, lengthy process of preparing the lander for transport. Curiosity will launch near the end of 2011. No cats were harmed during its construction.
Mars eats orbiters for lunch and landers for dinner, unfortunately. It's called "rocket science" for a reason. If we limited our efforts to sure-fire bets, we'd still be squinting through telescopes and wondering who dug the canals.
I'm confident that if anyone can pull off a project this ambitious, the JPL folks can. If they fail, I'll be happy with raising my taxes by the $1.50/year it will cost to try again.
Heh, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, because I haven't followed his work since the Cassini episode. But before that, he actually was a decent science writer, someone who could bring leading-edge physics down the mountain and talk intelligently to the people who are asked to fund it.
That's why I was so disillusioned when he went off the deep end. Science desperately needs good communicators like Kaku... and it needs them to not go full retard.
"I'll be happy with raising my taxes by the $1.50/year it will cost to try again."
So would I. Unfortunately they're going to cut our taxes by $1.50 and spend the money anyway.
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My understanding (slight as that may be) is that the vehicle is too heavy to land by parachute in the thin Martian atmosphere.
BTW, what did you think of the DIRECT architecture?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!