Curiosity's Closing In

In less than a month, NASA's Curiosity rover is scheduled to land on Mars.  The landing site is an impressive 95 mile wide crater that boasts a 3 mile high central mountain.  Curiosity, the size of a Mini Cooper, is loaded with scientific equipment that will allow it to study Mars' atmosphere, surface, and past in an attempt to determine whether Mars boasts, or ever boasted, life.

Before Curiosity can do any of that, however, it must land safely, and NASA is going with an untried, complex landing sequence to get the most sophisticated rover ever sent to another planet on the ground.  Curiosity will enter the Martian atmosphere behind a heat shield, then descend under huge parachutes.  Rockets will take over and further slow the probe as it nears the ground, and at about twenty feet off the surface, rockets will create a kind of steady platform, a "sky crane," from which Curiosity will be dropped on to its six wheels.  Many things have to go right at the right time for the landing to be successful.

NASA decided to put so many of its eggs in one basket, then risk that basket on a complex, novel landing approach because of the high quality-- even potentially historic and breakthrough-- science the mission promises.  Another factor is surely that the agency could not count on Congress to support a step-by-step approach, so it went with some big mission gambles along with a steady orbiter progrram.  Curiosity is the last of those big gambles as Congress has indeed cut the planetary exploration program in the wake of the economic downturn.