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nail-biting-landing
NASA’s Mars bet365体育赛事 Laboratory is on its way. In a little more than a month, the 1-ton rover, which launched in November, will descend to the Martian surface.
The nuclear-powered robot is designed to make spectacular new discoveries about the Red Planet. It will drill and analyze the Martian soil to search for signs of water, past or present, and determine whether or not the planet was ever able to support life.
MSL dwarfs its immediate predecessors, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity and could almost crush the first Martian rover, Sojourner, beneath one wheel. Bringing a robot this large down safely necessitates a never-before-attempted landing system, though the increased size has let scientists pack 10 state-of-the-art instruments aboard and should allow the robot to rove farther than any before.
“Every time we land a new rover on Mars, our ability to understand the surface increases tremendously,” said geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech who is the project scientist for the mission.
While scientists don’t know exactly what new findings await the rover, they have good ideas of what they want to look for. The first few weeks of MSL’s life on Mars are already planned out in detail and after the mission starts in earnest, researchers have a number of targets they are eager to explore.
Here, Wired takes a look at MSL’s game plan after it gets its wheels on the ground on Aug. 5, and the early discoveries scientists are hoping to make.
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