As NASA's Curiosity rover gets closer to its early Monday morning landing on Mars, the agency has released a spectacular simulator that will take you through every detail of the complicated landing procedure.
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If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft, officially called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), will land on the Red Planet at 1:30 A.M. Eastern Time on August 5.
The remarkable web-based interactive animation lets you see precisely where in space the 1-ton, $2.5 billion Mars rover is located at this moment, or using Preview Mode, you can jump forward and backward in time, speeding up events so you can see each aspect of the flight and landing. That includes the last step, which lowers the unusually heavy rover using an incredible "sky crane."
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During the "seven minutes of terror," NASA's way of explaining the Rube Goldbergian process of landing the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars, it won't be possible to watch the Mars landing live because of the 14-minute communications delay between Mars and Earth. But an interactive animation of the landing will be viewable in real time in this simulator as it happens early Monday morning.
In the meantime, we've been having lots of fun playing with this simulator, going forward and backward in time, dragging the mouse to change camera angles, and even looking back at a tiny Earth, way off in the distance.
Try it yourself -- and pay close attention to those "seven minutes of terror," the most complicated landing sequence ever attempted. While you're at it, keep your fingers crossed at 1:30 A.M. Eastern time on Monday morning, because key NASA officials are saying there's a lot riding on this landing. Doug McQuiston, director of NASA's Mars exploration program calls it "the most significant event in the history of planetary exploration."
Lead scientist for the mission, John Grotzinger, told Space.com, “I think if we are fatal on landing, that will have a very negative influence." He added, "It’s going to force people to look back and ask if it's possible to achieve these very complex, more demanding missions from a technological perspective. How can you talk about sample-return if you can’t do MSL [Mars Science Laboratory] first?"
Good luck, NASA. Do you think the spacecraft will land on Mars successfully?
This story originally published on Mashable here.
