One year ago August 6, NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars. What have we learned from the mission, and what lies ahead? Find out at “Meet Me on Mars,” a five-hour series of exhibits and activities at the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton, Va.
The Aug. 6 event, sponsored by NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event will feature hands-on activities such as making a Mars rover, a balloon rocket, a planet and an edible comet in honor of “comet of the c”entury ISON, which is headed our way.
NASA Langley employees will be on hand to talk about the Curiosity mission and to also discuss what is being learned about the entire solar system and the agency’s future planetary missions.
Langley contributions
More than 100 researchers and technicians at NASA Langley worked on the Mars mission. One of their contributions was a science instrument package, built primarily at Langley, that gathered data during the last eight minutes of the flight.
The MEDLI (MSL Entry, Descent and Landing Instrumentation) on the spacecraft’s heat shield measured the heat and atmospheric pressure of entry into the Martian atmosphere for the first time ever. That information could be used to build better spacecraft in the future.
Engineers are performed millions of simulations for the entry, descent and landing phase of the mission – the so-called “Seven Minutes of Terror” when the spacecraft had to successfully perform dozens of maneuvers in order to land.
Langley engineers also built the mini-computer that controls a laser on the Curiosity rover. The laser shoots a beam at a rock, burning into it while the instrument examines the smoke, allowing scientists to determine its composition.
For more information about the Mars Science Laboratory mission, go to
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/main/index.html
For more information about Langley go to
https://www.nasa.gov/langley
For more information about the Virginia Air & Space Center – NASA Langley’s official visitor center – go to
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Michael Finneran
757-864-6110
michael.p.finneran@gmail.com