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NEWS > SCIENCE > NASA ROVER SENT TO MARS SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT CRASHING RUSSIAN ONE
NASA ROVER SENT TO MARS SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT CRASHING RUSSIAN ONE
November 27 2011
Washington, D.C. – NASA has launched an ambitious expedition to Mars with a new probe that will scour the Martian landscape looking for signs of life. The Curiosity rover, launched from the Atlas 5 rocket, will take eight and half months to reach the red planet where, hopefully, it will land safely and try to find our first evidence of extraterrestrial life.
The launch comes just days after a similarly ambitious launch by the Russian space authority failed to break Earth orbit and lost contact with terrestrial communications. That probe has shown fleeting signs of life and may be transitioned to other tasks, possibly investigating a near Earth asteroid, but will never, ever, never ever reach Mars like the American probe which could very well change the way we see the universe and our place in it.
Russian officials have made no comment on the launch of the American craft but it believed that they are really not happy about the whole thing and have little option but to suck it up.
“Our spacecraft is in excellent health and it's on its way to Mars. I hope we have more work than the scientists can handle. When we get to the surface, I expect them all to be overrun with data they've never seen before. I expect the public to have images, vistas that we've never seen before,” said a NASA official.
Russian officials had similar hopes for their Martian probe, the Phobos-Grunt, but that chatter has pretty much fallen away with the failure of the launch.
That probe may still fall from the sky and crash to Earth in a fiery mess. The Curiosity probe could suffer a similar fate on Mars, but at least it will be on Mars.
“Mars is a particularly tough place to land. Ships more often than not end up crashing, not necessarily to the point of destruction, but very far from what they had tried to accomplish. Of course all planets may be like that, we just haven’t sent many probes out to other ones and so haven’t had the same failure rates,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “As many as have crashed, though, at least its better than the Russians have done. They tried it a whole bunch of times and never once even come close to Mars. You would think they would have stopped trying by now but those Russians, they are a tough bunch.”
NASA has kind of helped try to find and repair the damaged probe, but are too busy sending stuff to Mars to dedicate too much time to the project.
“This probe may or may not uncover more details of the nature of life and existence, but it will be a great effort no matter which way you look at it. They got that thing going, have it on the way, and it will likely land and do some good work on the planet. That is an accomplishment unto itself,” continued Poe. “It’s great that the Russians are trying these things and they really should keep trying. Eventually they’ll get it right and actually be able to land on the planet. Maybe. At the very least they can feel good about having tried over and over again even if they don’t have much success.”
NASA is still considering a request by the Russian space agency to share some of the data from the Curiosity probe when it does land and start to work.
Anna Phillips, Science Correspondent
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