CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. ? NASA has launched its next Mars rover, kicking off a long-awaited mission to investigate whether the Red Planet could ever have hosted microbial life.
The car-size Curiosity rover blasted off atop its Atlas 5 rocket today (Nov. 26) at 10:02 a.m. EST (1502 GMT), streaking into a cloudy sky above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here. The huge robot's next stop is Mars, though the 354-million-mile (570-million-kilometer) journey will take 8 1/2 months.
Joy Crisp, a deputy project scientist for the rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., called the liftoff "spectacular."
"This feels great," she said as she watched the rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral. [Photos: Curiosity Rover Launches to Mars]
Pamela Conrad, deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's mission at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said, "Every milestone feels like such a relief."
NASA expected around 13,500 people to watch the liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, with many more viewing from surrounding areas, setting a record for the number of spectators watching an unmanned launch.
"It's a beautiful day," Conrad added. "The sun's out, and all these people came out to watch."
The work Curiosity does when it finally arrives should revolutionize our understanding of the Red Planet and pave the way for future efforts to hunt for potential Martian life, researchers said.
"It is absolutely a feat of engineering, and it will bring science like nobody's ever expected," Doug McCuistion, head of NASA's Mars exploration program, said of Curiosity. "I can't even imagine the discoveries that we're going to come up with."
A long road to launch
Curiosity's cruise to Mars may be less challenging than its long and bumpy trek to the launch pad, which took nearly a decade.
NASA began planning Curiosity's mission ? which is officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) ? back in 2003. The rover was originally scheduled to blast off in 2009, but it wasn't ready in time.
Launch windows for Mars-bound spacecraft are based on favorable alignments between Earth and the Red Planet, and they open up just once every two years. So the MSL team had to wait until 2011.
That two-year slip helped boost the mission's overall cost by 56 percent, to its current $2.5 billion. But today's successful launch likely chased away a lot of the bad feelings still lingering after the delay and cost overruns.
"I think you could visibly see the team morale improve ? the team grinned more, the team smiled more ? as the rover and the vehicle came closer, and more and more together here when we were at Kennedy [Space Center]" preparing for liftoff, MSL project manager Pete Theisinger of JPL said a few days before launch.
A rover behemoth
Curiosity is a beast of a rover. At 1 ton, it weighs five times more than each of the last two rovers NASA sent to Mars, the golf-cart-size twins Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in January 2004 to search for signs of past water activity.
While Spirit and Opportunity each carried five science instruments, Curiosity sports 10, including a rock-zapping laser and equipment designed to identify organic compounds ? carbon-based molecules that are the building blocks of life as we know it.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=93179a7f1577f8c2f7c3496307e3c80d
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