国产热热热精品,亚洲视频久久】日韩,三级婷婷在线久久,99人妻精品视频,精品九热人人肉肉在线,AV东京热一区二区,91po在线视频观看,久久激情宗合,青青草黄色手机视频

World / World top pics

Mars rover Curiosity gears up for Wed test drive

(Agencies) Updated: 2012-08-22 10:50

Mars rover Curiosity gears up for Wed test drive

This full-resolution image from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars shows the turret of tools at the end of the rover's extended robotic arm, in this image taken August 20, 2012 and released by NASA August 21. The Navigation Camera captured this view. [Photo/Agencies]

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, dispatched to study if the Red Planet could have hosted life, will take its first test drive on Wednesday.

The one-ton, nuclear-powered robotic geologist, which landed inside a Martian crater on Aug 6, will get instructions for a 30-minute drive, mission manager Michael Watkins told reporters on a conference call Tuesday.

Later in the day, Curiosity will drive about 10 feet (3 meters), turn its wheels, then drive back to its landing site, ending up at a 90-degree angle from where it touched down inside Gale Crater.

"We want to park in a place we've exactly examined. We just want to be extra safe," Watkins said.

Ultimately, scientists plan to drive the six-wheeled rover, which is about the size of a small car, to a 3-mile-high (5-km-high) mound of layered rock rising from the center of the crater's floor, the primary target of the $2.5 billion, two-year mission.

Scientists believe the mound, known as Mount Sharp, is the remnant of sediment that once completely filled the 96-mile-wide (154-km-wide) basin.

The rover is equipped with 10 science instruments to search for organic materials and other minerals needed to support and possibly preserve microbial life.

Determining how Mount Sharp formed might be a little more difficult with the loss of one of Curiosity's two wind sensors, designed to measure the speed and direction of the planet's often unpredictable breezes.

Engineers suspect small pebbles kicked up by the rover's landing rockets during touchdown may have hit its deck and severed delicate wires on one of the sensor's exposed circuit boards.

"These are pretty fragile devices," deputy project scientists Ashwin Vasavada said, adding the damage is believed to be permanent.

DETECTING WIND SPEED

The lose of one sensor may make it more challenging for scientists to determine wind speed and direction inside Gale Crater, located near the planet's equator.

Scientists suspect that winds long ago circled inside the crater, transporting sediment that eventually built up Mount Sharp, which rises slightly above the basin's rim. Winds also likely play a role in forming and moving sand dunes that ring Mount Sharp today.

"We are trying to figure out how much sediment is going in today, how much is able to be carried out and then projecting that backward in time, using our computer simulations, to figure out basically how the mound came to be and what processes have shaped it and formed it and then eroded it over time," Vasavada said.

So far, the wind sensor is the only instrument on Curiosity that is not working properly. On Monday, the rover flexed its robot arm for the first time since landing on Mars and pivoted one of its back wheels, a preparation for Wednesday's test drive.

The arm holds a 73-pound (33 kg) turret of tools needed to collect and analyze rock and soil samples.

"The arm has already performed all these motions on Earth, but in a different gravity condition and that gravity does matter," said rover engineer Louise Jandura, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Trudeau visits Sina Weibo
May gets little gasp as EU extends deadline for sufficient progress in Brexit talks
Ethiopian FM urges strengthened Ethiopia-China ties
Yemen's ex-president Saleh, relatives killed by Houthis
Most Popular
Hot Topics

...
晴隆县| 中卫市| 阳城县| 郎溪县| 桐城市| 库伦旗| 台中县| 宜宾县| 祁东县| 象山县| 井陉县| 苍溪县| 龙南县| 根河市| 乌什县| 张家界市| 郴州市| 额尔古纳市| 芦溪县| 报价| 江油市| 龙游县| 博乐市| 兴山县| 库伦旗| 浠水县| 密云县| 宜都市| 贡山| 化州市| 张北县| 神农架林区| 铜山县| 天全县| 饶阳县| 信宜市| 彭阳县| 鄂托克旗| 雅安市| 桃园县| 寻乌县|