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July 29th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Dr Stephen Lewis, a senior lecturer at the Open University who is a member of
the entry, descent and landing team for the Curiosity mission, said: “A
mission like this probably only comes along once in a lifetime; there are
going to be a lot of nervous people keeping their fingers crossed next
Sunday.”
With an atmosphere up to 200 times thinner than the Earth’s and with just a
third of its gravity, landing a one ton rover on Mars presents unique
challenges as a parachute will not slow the spacecraft down enough to land
safely.
Over the next week Dr Lewis and his fellow scientists will be intently
studying the atmosphere and weather above the landing site in the hope of
predicting the conditions the lander will face when it arrives, so it can be
prepared for the final descent.
Curiosity will have travelled 352 million miles since it was launched in
November last year by the time it reaches the edge of the Martian
atmosphere. From there it will take just seven minutes to reach the ground.
The entry capsule will enter Mars’ atmosphere 81 miles above the surface,
slowing down as air resistance builds, causing its heat shield to reach
temperatures of more than 3,800 degrees F as it descends.
Around seven miles above the surface, a 51 feet wide parachute will deploy,
slowing it to 180 miles per hour until it is just mile above, when the
parachute and outer capsule will be detached entirely from the sky crane
inside.
Booster rockets on the sky crane will then fire, slowing it to just 1.7 miles
per hour while on board radar and computers will steer it towards the
landing zone.
The rover will finally be lowered 20 feet from the crane on nylon cords to set
it down gently on the surface. The sky crane will then detach and fly away.
However, with more than 154 million miles of space separating Mars from the
Earth, it will take 14 minutes for signals from the spacecraft to reach the
scientists back on Earth. It would take another 14 to send any instructions
to the rover.
It means the rover will have to control the landing by itself using on-board
computers. By the time Nasa’s mission control hears that it has entered the
Martian atmosphere, the rover will either be safely on the ground, or it
will have been smashed to pieces in the descent.
Tom Rivellini, an engineer at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on
the new landing system, said: “The entry, descent and landing is also known
as seven minutes of terror.
“We have to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars, going
from 13,000 miles per hour to zero, in perfect sequence, perfect
choreography, and perfect timing. If any one thing does not go right, it is
game over.”
Although it has never used a “sky crane” system to land a vehicle on another
planet before, Nasa chose to use it to touch down its most expensive ever
planetary rover on Mars, to enable it to land with greater accuracy in areas
never before explored.
It is a big gamble. Of the 17 missions that have aimed to land on Mars since
the first by the USSR in 1971, 10 have ended in failure.
If successful, Curiosity has a suite of advanced scientific instruments on
board to analysing the planet’s rock, soil and atmosphere for clues about
how wet the planet was in the past, whether it supported life, and what led
to it becoming the barren red desert it now is.
A robotic arm on the rover with a drill and scoop will allow it to delve down
into the rock and soil further than ever before.
Dr John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa’s science mission
directorate, said: “The Curiosity landing is the hardest robotic mission
ever attempted by Nasa.
“But it holds the potential to look for evidence of habitable environments if
they existed on Mars in the distant past. It has the capacity to discover
the building blocks of life if it ever existed on Mars.
“It is phenomenal that we have a rover that is this close to helping us answer
these questions.”
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