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Los Angeles, Aug. 3: Mankind could only be a decade away from walking on Mars, a Nasa scientist has said, as the US space agency makes its final preparations to land a one-tonne exploratory rover — the largest yet — on the barren planet.
A probe the size of a small car will hurtle through the Martian atmosphere at 20,921kmph early on Monday morning using engineering which, if successful, could lay the path for the first manned Mars landing.
Using a giant £1.67 billion heat shield, the world’s biggest supersonic parachute and eight rocket thrusters, scientists hope Curiosity, a super robot kitted out with 17 cameras and dozens of sampling instruments, will be the test of technological prowess needed to prove an astronaut could eventually descend on the Red Planet in the future.
“If we had the motive, if it was important enough I would say within 10 years we could be there,” Adam Steltzner, the lead mechanical engineer for the entry, told The Daily Telegraph. “Putting men on Mars is not unachievable. It is just really hard and expensive. So if the world were to find itself with enough resources and the motivation, we could do it.”
Scientists will use a “guided entry” system to land the Curiosity rover, with jet boosters firing at the back of the craft to help her steer through the atmosphere towards the Gale crater landing site.
It will take a nail-biting “seven minutes of terror” for Curiosity to land, but 14 minutes until Nasa’s more than 100-strong team of scientists will discover the fate of the probe and whether a combined three centuries of human investment has paid off.
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