Mars landing was Olympian feat

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August 8, 2012

Mars landing was Olympian feat

Anonymous Daily Star The Daily Star Wed Aug 08, 2012, 09:20 AM EDT

If the mission of Curiosity were an Olympic event, it would be safe to say that the Mars rover absolutely nailed the dismount at the end of a flawless routine.

It's wonderful that the American public and especially children can admire the exploits of such Olympic heroes as swimmer Michael Phelps, gymnast Gabby Douglas and our own Cooperstown native, triathlete Sarah Groff.

But let's take a few moments to give a gold medal to hundreds of folks who probably wouldn't mind at all if you called then nerds.

These are the people who sent a spaceship from the planet Earth to the planet Mars 354 million miles away in deep, dark outer space. The journey began Nov. 26, and ended at exactly 1:32 Eastern time Monday, precisely the moment predicted months ago.

"The team went to the Olympics, and we weren't sure what would happen," Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told a jubilant crowd of co-workers. "But you came back with the gold."

Incredibly, given a degree of difficulty that went well beyond daunting, everything went perfectly on the distant world.

The two previous roving vehicles NASA sent to Mars were delivered using a method in which they were cushioned by a balloon device that bounced along the surface. But the Mars Science Laboratory was much too big for that to work.

The method employed during its "seven minutes of terror" descent is far too complicated to do justice here, but it entailed slowing the craft down from 13,000 miles an hour to a 2 mph upright landing ... with Mission Control helpless to do anything if something went wrong.

And so much could have gone wrong. It takes 14 minutes for signals to reach Earth from the Red Planet, so with the spacecraft in "entry mode," Curiosity was on its own.

What if the ship wasn't able to shift into the right direction to deploy its heat shield to protect the rover? What if the zig-zagging it did to slow the descent went awry? What if the ballast material didn't get ejected from the ship on cue? What if the huge parachute didn't deploy correctly? What if the rockets slowing the ship malfunctioned? What if the wires lowering the rover snapped? What if, what if, what if ....?

Watching the Olympics in London, Americans are justifiably proud of their athletes and often break into cheers of "USA! USA! USA!"

What the "nerds" in Pasadena accomplished was even more impressive. There was a crowd early Monday morning in New York City's Times Square watching NASA's achievement.

They started chanting: "Science! Science! Science!"

Now that is a gold-medal moment we can all cherish.