Satellite to track Mars goes out of orbit
Tuesday, July 17th, 2012 3:09:07 by Ahmad Mehdi
Satellite to track Mars goes out of orbit
NASA might not be able to continue getting real-time coverage of the decent of Mars rover ‘Curiosity’ into Gale Crater as the satellite that was supposed to track the task went out of orbit due to a manoeuvring system glitch last month.
Engineers were able to recover the satellite, but it has shifted to a different orbit, because of which NASA may lose the signals to rover just as it is about to land on the red planet.
Curiosity is scheduled to land at 1:31 a.m. EDT (0531 GMT) on August 6 inside an 96-mile (155-km) wide impact basin.
The other two spacecrafts orbiting Mars will also be monitoring the rover’s arrival, but one records data for later playback and the other won’t be aligned to see the last minute of flight, informed NASA’s Mars exploration program chief Doug
McCuistion.
The Mars mission, designed to last two years, aims to assess whether Gale Crater had all the ingredients at the right time and in the right places for microbial life to arise and be preserved.
Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=29028
Posted by Ahmad Mehdi
on Jul 17 2012. Filed under World.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
