Excerpt
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, scientists and engineers cheered when a vehicle designed to roam across Mars landed last August in an area called the Gale Crater, practically right on target. It was an amazing feat, putting a one-ton rover the size of a car onto the Martian surface.
The trip took eight-and-a-half months and the project cost $2.5 billion dollars. The rover, called Curiosity, has been on Mars for nearly six months now, and it is sending back results. High-resolution photos coming from the surface of the planet are like nothing man has ever seen before, and scientists believe they could shed light on whether life ever existed on the fourth rock from the sun.
At JPL's lab, where a duplicate of Curiosity is used for testing, space scientist and engineer Adam Steltzner says the geologists are fired up over what they can see from 17 cameras mounted on the recently landed rover.
ADAM STELTZNER, Lead Landing Engineer: It's fantastic. You know, one thing about putting a rover on the surface of Mars is you get images of the surface that you can never get from orbiters, right? You resolve down to the millimeter level. You get right up, up close and personal with the Martian terrain, and whenever we do that, we learn new things.
No comments:
Post a Comment