Cav's Place

As anyone who’s interested would already know by now, Curiosity has successfully landed on Mars. What’s more, during those first few minutes after touchdown, when it could use Mars Odyssey to relay the data to Earth, it has even sent a couple of small pictures (first, second), showing its shadow and the terrain just around itself and causing all NASA sites that carried any information about it to promptly crash under the strain of the generated traffic. More data should be coming around this time, as the Odyssey will make another pass over it.

The mission itself will take a long time to actually get going, because it’s meant to last for at least about two Earth years but all systems have been designed and successfully tested to function for at least three times that long and the power supply should last for well over a decade. Of course, that doesn’t sound like quite so much when you factor in the fact that Opportunity has been functioning for over eight and a half years, but its primary mission was only supposed to last for about three months, so the results started coming in very quickly because they had to collect as much data as they could while they were reasonably certain that there won’t be any problems.
In fact, what I saw in the press conference just now was that they have a very long checklist that they’ll need to go through in order to ensure the health of such a complex rover and for the next few weeks we’ll probably be getting nothing but the results of tests, which may even stretch on for the next few months, and the base of the target mountain will probably only be reached after about a year. Still, even those test results may mean something, as in order to test the systems they’ll have to be analyzing something, so let’s see what happens… And let’s hope that the nuclear generator Curiosity carries won’t end up damaging another planet as well, because I’m still very uneasy about using something like that and would have really wanted them to find another solution.