Curiosity is NASA’s Mars rover. He is the robot the most advanced and ambitious ever built for Mars exploration. It was launched in November 2011 and landed on the Red Planet on August 5, 2012.
Curiosity landed inside Gale Crater in August 2012 to determine if the area ever experienced such conditions. conducive to the emergence of lifewhich he did by showing that Mars was livable for a short period of its history, in the distant past, which is measured in billions of years.
To land on Mars, NASA has developed a new landing technique. Curiosity entered theatmosphere Mars at some 21,000 km/h, protected by its heat shield. Three minutes before landing, he used a parachute 50 m long and 16 m in diameter. Five hundred meters before contact with the ground, retrorockets came into action, then the upper part deposited the rover on the surface at the end of a cable, like a construction crane.
France and Cnes on board Curiosity
The gear gate ten instruments and a mast equipped with cameras and a laser to study targets up to a distance of 7 m. It also has a 2.1 m articulated arm capable of drilling up to 6 cm in rock and extracting materials, which at the time had never been done on Mars.
This approximately $2.5 billion mission was carried out with the help of partners in Germany, Canada, Spain, France and Russia. Spain provides one of the three communication antennas and the Rems weather station (Rover Environmental Monitoring Station). France collaborated in the development of the ChemCam and Sam instruments. ChemCam is an instrument for elemental analysis of rocks and soils around the Curiosity rover up to about 9 meters.
As for Sam (Sample Analysis at Mars), it is a set of measuring instruments capable of determining the chemical composition (molecular, elementary and isotopic) of the Martian soil. Cnes also participates in operations on the surface of Mars in real time. Finally, Canada provides the probe of the spectrometer with alpha particles and X-rays.
Unlike previous rovers equipped with solar panels, Curiosity has a battery energy nuclear — actually a generator Radioisotope Thermoelectric (RTG) — allowing it to operate day or night.
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[EN VIDÉO] Curiosity: breathtaking views from the side of Mount Sharp Nine years after its landing on Mars and almost as long to cover the bottom of the Gale crater, the Curiosity rover continues its journey on the red planet on the side of Mount Sharp – also called Aeolis Mons. And it continues to send back extraordinary images to astronomers curious to learn more than the climatic conditions that may have prevailed on the red planet in the past. (in English) © NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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