Jet Propulsion Laboratory
It’s 10 PM at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The team behind the Curiosity mission are locked in a crucial test at the space flight control centre.
They are practising for a landing they know is the most audacious ever attempted on another planet. They’ve been rehearsing and testing day and night for months, running through each individual step of the mission in painstaking detail.
Joel Krajewski, Brian Portock, Ann Devereaux, Adam Stelzner
Brian Portock is a flight director for the 350 million-mile journey to Mars. Ann Devereaux helped devise a way to stay in touch with the rover. Adam Stelzner will mastermind the daredevil landing. And leading this test is chief engineer, Joel Krajewski.
Joel Krajewski
Joel Krajewski “The fate of this mission is central to everybody’s soul, really. Most folks have worked on this for three years, five years, eight years. You don’t get to do many in a given career. You only get to do a few if you’re lucky. So the stakes for everybody are as high as they can be.”
This is just a rehearsal, but on 6 August, they’ll be doing it for real, hoping the Curiosity rover will arrive safely at its destination.
Mars, the Red Planet. It’s become known as the Bermuda Triangle of space. Since the launch of the first rockets there in the 1960s, two-thirds of all missions have ended in disaster. The mission logs make scary reading. “Failed to launch.”, “Missed the planet.”, “Lost radio contact.”, “Lost on arrival”
The team knows Curiosity might never reach the surface of Mars.
Its Joel Krajewski’s job to make sure this mission is a success. His day may begin like many Californians… But then he heads to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Joel Krajewski “Like anyone else, I drive into work every morning, but every morning, as I do so, I pinch myself because I get to work on a space mission and that is, that is pretty cool.”
For more than a decade, Joel has been engineering rovers to send to the Red Planet.
Joel Krajewski “Before I got into working on rovers, of course like anybody else I thought it was going to be a kind of a tricky business. It sounds hard throwing things up into space and exploring other planets. Once I got into it, I learned that it’s even harder than I thought.”
Curiosity
This is the third rover that Joel has worked on. But even for a Mars veteran like him, Curiosity has been a huge challenge.
Joel Krajewski “Curiosity is the most complex vehicle we have sent to Mars. Hundreds of people have worked on it for more than eight years and we’re still working on it. Different people understand different aspects of it, but nobody knows it all.”
As the real Curiosity hurtles through space, it’s clone is hidden in a garage at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It runs on its very own nuclear generator. Its components can withstand forces greater than those exerted on a supersonic jet. And its elegant tracks are designed to work at temperatures far lower than the coldest places on Earth. It’s the most advanced moving vehicle ever sent into space.
Today, Joel’s team are testing the wheels of Curiosity’s twin. It’s just one of hundreds of tests that the rover has been through in the past nine months.
Joel Krajewski “The scientists want to land on Mars and explore . They want to explore where they land and then also explore kilometres away from where we land, and that means we have to drive. We’d like to be able to drive over big rocks so that we can drive close to a straight line, and not too much meandering around, and therefore we designed a big rover. That makes it tricky.”
The reason Curiosity is so big and expensive is because of the science it will be conducting on Mars. It will have to drive across difficult terrain while carrying a lab full of equipment.
Joel Krajewski “The scientists would like an infinitely capable vehicle. But then in the real world, the machine has to fit within a certain volume. It has to fit within a certain mass. We can only lift so much mass off the Earth and have it land safely on Mars.”
The rover is five times as heavy as any vehicle they’ve ever launched, which makes landing it on another planet more difficult than anything they’ve attempted before.
Joel Krajewski “Landing a big rover is a tough business. The landing system is more complex, parachutes are bigger, everything gets much bigger and therefore harder.”
NASA’s engineers have never shied away from tricky landings. During the Apollo missions of the 1970s, they weren’t satisfied just to put a man on the moon. But landing a car on Mars is an entirely different proposition.
External Links
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – Official Website
