By John Ballard
Barring any unexpected changes to the weather forecast at Cape Canaveral, the rocket carrying NASA's new Mars rover Curiosity will launch just after 10 a.m. EST tomorrow morning, with touch down on the Red Planet expected to take place in August, 2012. Curiosity is ten-feet long and weighs 1984 pounds, which makes it twice as long and four times heavier than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. It has a top speed of 300 feet per-hour, but is expected to move around Mars at an average speed of 98 feet per hour. The rover's scheduled to spend 23 earth months -- one Martian year -- exploring the surface of the planet.
?More pictures and commentary at the Atlantic.
Touchdown scheduled for August, 2012.
Wonder if anything else will be about to happen then? Let's see...
Election coming up in a few weeks?
That has nothing to do with the schedule...
...does it?
Nah.
Surely not. Must be a coincidence.
Yes, it is a coincidence. There are periods of time called "launch windows" which give the optimum conditions for sending a spacecraft to another planet. They occur every 26 months for Earth to Mars.
ReplyDeleteSee http://athena.cornell.edu/mars_facts/sb_launch_window.html