NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity landed on the surface of the red planet at 1:32 a.m. EST on August 6, 2012. While this isn’t the first vehicle we’ve landed on Mars, it is the largest and it packs over ten times as much scientific equipment. More than that, though, this represents the beginning of a new phase of Mars surface exploration.

Simply stated, we’ve never tried to land something this big so precisely on another planet before. The rover weighs over one ton, had to withstand temperatures up to 3,800 degrees during its descent, and land within a certain area. Curiosity needed to prove that it could be landed in a specific 12.4-mile landing zone and have enough long-range mobility to collect more diverse samples for study.

The Landing Process

The landing can be one of the most complicated portions of the mission, and any one of a million things could go wrong and 2.5-billion-dollars-worth of technology would be scattered across another planet.

The MSL entered the atmosphere at a brisk 12,000 mph, deployed its parachute, separated from its heat shields, and engaged the rocket-powered sky crane which landed the rover ready on the surface. In order to manage all that, NASA had to push two of its High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters running PowerEdge servers from Dell enough to analyze the vast amounts of data necessary to complete the process safely. And now that it’s there, it’s time to get to work.

Objectives and Goals

There are four basic goals for the Curiosity’s mission to mars. The mission will try to determine whether life ever arose on Mars, and then to characterize the climate and build a better understanding of the planet’s geology. Finally, this may be used as an example of possible human exploration by proving that it is possible to land extremely heavy payloads safely.

In order to reach these goals, NASA has split Curiosity’s mission up into a . The biological objectives, for example, are to discover and determine the nature of any organic carbon compounds, take an inventory of the chemicals necessary for the building blocks of life, and find any features that may be related to the effects of biological processes as we understand them.

On the geological and geochemical side, the objectives are to examine the mineral, isotopic, and chemical compositions on the surface, and then try to determine what process might have formed the soil and rocks in that particular way.

Finally, the Curiosity will try to access long-timescale atmospheric evolutions processes and figure out the present state, distribution, and cycling of water and carbon dioxide, and characterize all the radiation on the surface (cosmic, solar, etc) that could affect any future landings on the planet.

If the rest of the mission goes as well as the landing, we could start receiving a lot of new information very quickly. The things we learn could very easily change our understanding of Mars and open up new possibilities for exploration.

Author Bio: David Borg works with Dell and loves writing about anything tech related. When he is not working he enjoys spending time with his family. If you want more information about Dell computers click here.

Image Credits:

Image of jars and people behind desk: Credit “NASA HQ on Flickr”
Image of server: Dell.com