Jorge a. Bañales
Washington, 26 nov (EFE) – “Curiosity”, the robot best equipped to date for the space exploration today began a journey of 9,65 millions of miles in the next eight months and a half for answers about life in Marte.
An Atlas V rocket upright on the platform 41 Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida (United States).(UU.), ignited its powerful engines at the time 15.02 GMT, passed through the blanket of clouds and propelled the capsule within which travels “Curiosity” to more than 24,000 kilometres an hour.
If everything works fine, in August 2012 a platform equipped with four rocket propellant will be close to Mars Gale crater and through pulleys, deposited with the robot from a ton of weight and three meters in length.
The task “Curiosity” take place then it could revolutionize human on knowledge Marte.
“It is absolutely, a feat of engineering and bring us scientific knowledge that we cannot even imagine,” according to Doug McCuistion, director of the program of Mars exploration in the American space agency NASA.
The “Curiosity” is the vehicle of the laboratory of Sciences Martian (MSL, for its acronym in English), equipped to answer questions about whether there was or persist on Mars organic life, components, and how much liquid water contained the planet in the past.
The tasks of the set of instruments for the analysis of samples from Mars (SAM) include the search for organic compounds, that is, molecules based on carbon that are the elements that forms of life as we know are constructed.
The robot Explorer MSL will use a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, and tunable laser spectrometer to analyze the samples of air, soil and rocks.
When SAM data are combined with the other instruments of the MSL scientists will be able to determine not only whether a molecule is organic, but also if it came from a source with life or without life.
The components have been falling on Mars from meteorites, comets, and interplanetary over 4.5 billion years dust particles and the mission scientists believe that Mars probably has its organic indigenous, connected or not with forms of life.
The laboratory of Sciences Martian can investigate these habitable environments that could preserve, also, the components organic.
However, the preservation of organic in the land component is very uneven, so if they are not found in the crater Gale, where will drop “Curiosity”, that does not necessarily indicate the absence in other parts of the geologic Marte. record
System of environmental observation of “Curiosity” will measure the temperatures of the air and soil, speed and direction of the winds, atmospheric pressure, humidity and radiation ultraviolet around the device Explorer.
This information will help scientists to understand how they interact the soil and the atmosphere of the planet, which could give ideas about whether Marte could sustain microscopic forms of life under the thin layers of sales on its surface.
El “Curiosity” is five times heavier than its predecessors, the “Spirit” and “Opportunity” explorers who came to Mars in January 2004 looking for traces of water. EFE
