The Impact Of Nasa's Curiosity Rover On Mars

Sending Curiosity, a space rover, to mars is much more difficult than sending people into outer space for 2 major reasons: the amount of collaboration/effort and planning. NASA said that this mission “introduced the world to one of the most daring, inventive feats of engineering the world had ever witnessed: the pinpoint landing of NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars.” In addition, “no mission this ambitious had ever been attempted in the past” and “the landing presented problems that could not be compared directly to anything done before.” The amount of collaboration and effort put into this mission is unbelievable. According to “Seven Minutes of Terror”, The seven minutes explored in that story and experienced by the world in early August 2012,
“took place after seven years of engineering, one year of spaceflight, and countless hours of collaboration on the perfect landing. Dubbed the MSL, this mission brought together more than 7,000 people, working in organizations from all over the world, to accomplish its goals.” In other words, this mission took 8 years in total put together with the help of many geniuses across the globe.
Skeptics may argue that there was probably more effort put into the rocket because of its cost. Well, according to “seven minutes of terror”, the curiosity rover itself costs “2 billion dollars”. But according to NASA, an average rocket/space shuttle launch costs about 450 million dollars. This proves that Curiosity is much more expensive and, therefore, had harder work put into it. The second reason the Curiosity mission was much more difficult than sending people into space is because of the planning. The planning basically includes the 2 parts of the mission; the launch and landing. The launch was very risky because of the consequences faced if it fails as stated in the
passage “Miscalculating a vector or failing to account for an aspect of the orbits could lead to a $2 billion failure.” Videlicet, if a single thing goes wrong Curiosity will fail, and result in a loss of 2 billion dollars. The second part of planning is the landing. The landing is one of the most challenging things in the entire mission. Since, Curiosity needs to go from “13,000 miles per hour to zero miles per hour in just seven minutes” they couldn’t just use a parachute to slow it down they had to design an extremely complex system of landing as explained in the story, “Since the atmosphere of Mars is 100 times thinner than the atmosphere of Earth, the parachute alone could not reduce the speed of descent past 200 miles per hour- a breakneck speed that would surely damage Curiosity upon landing. Curiosity outweighed any earlier rover and contained over 150 pounds of sensitive scientific devices, so an airbag solution was ruled out. Instead, EDL engineers designed maneuver that would allow the entry capsule to turn sharply and activate powerful rockets to finish the job. Once this maneuver was complete, the capsule could attempt a vertical landing.” But the catch to this was that “the force from the rockets could kick up so much dust that the dust itself would damage the rover”. Thinking one step ahead, though, EDL engineers produced a mechanism called “sky crane” to finish the last step of landing. When the sky crane reached about 20 feet above Mars, it lowered Curiosity on the Martian soil using cables.
People who oppose this point of view will claim that there was more planning when sending people outer space because it was a totally new thing in history.
This is absolutely not true because there was not even a landing involved in sending people into space. In addition, according to Amanda Schupak, “The total mission lasted just 108 minutes, and the trip once around the Earth at 17,500 mph (most of the way) took less than an hour and a half.” The numbers speak for itself, If a trip to space lasted for such a short time then obviously there was very little planning. Plus, there were no challenges faced in taking off mentioned in the “From Earth to Outer Space” article.
In conclusion, sending Curiosity, an expensive rover, to mars took years of hard work from amazing engineers. Nothing can compare to the difficulties faced by the NASA team during the “Seven Minutes of Terror.” Sending Curiosity is much more arduous than sending people into outer
space.