Supreme Curiosity

In a world under threat, humankind continues to reach for the stars—and its aspirations are now embodied by a machine dubbed Curiosity.

It took a journey of eight months and a distance of over 500 million kilometers, but on August 5 (Aug. 6 in Manila), the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) literally took the next giant step in the study of our known universe. Protected by a heat shield, slowed by parachutes and controlled by rockets, Nasa’s Mars Science Laboratory rover—aptly dubbed Curiosity—made a perfect landing in the Gale Crater on the surface of the planet Mars. “Touchdown confirmed,” reported an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “We’re safe on Mars.” And a roomful of some of the world’s best scientists burst into applause.

 
Traveling to the red planet has long been among humankind’s larger than life dreams. It’s the stuff of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ and Ray Bradbury’s imaginings, and the next logical target after the successful moon landing in 1969. Getting to Mars has been an epic journey, as more than half of the over three dozen attempts to either fly by or land on the planet by the countries who have made it to space—the United States, the Soviet Union and Japan, among others—have ended in disastrous failure. Eighteen astronauts and cosmonauts died in the process of getting to space; many others never actually got to that vast frontier, having perished in the preparation.

Nasa itself had been grieving over the mothballing of its front-liner space shuttle program after three decades and 135 missions. Handicapped by budget cuts and suffering a loss in glamour, America’s space program needed an ambitious plan to get to the top again, and this it achieved with Curiosity. Having gambled a mind-boggling $2.5 billion on the latest rover, Nasa wants its baby to do more than just toddle around on Mars’ surface. After all, the previous rover landings and various flybys have suggested that Mars might have had water on its surface at one point. Curiosity will set out to prove that—and more. The mobile laboratory will also attempt to find traces of carbon, another invaluable element for life. “We’re not just looking for water anymore,” said lead scientist John Grotzinger. “The challenge for Mars exploration is to first try to identify environments that might have been habitable and then ask, ‘Is this the kind of place where organic carbon could have been preserved?’”

For the moment, Curiosity is standing still for “health” checks but beaming photographs to mission control. In the next month, Nasa will be putting the rover through a series of function tests before it sets out on its first task—just moving about. Once it is actually mobile, it will obtain soil samples from Mars’ surface. The 154-kilometer-wide Gale Crater was specifically selected as the landing site because it would provide the best chance to answer Nasa’s burning questions (its tallest peak, Mount Sharp, is made up of sediment that is all that remains of what was once in the crater). The nuclear-powered, car-sized Curiosity will eventually deploy its robotic drill arm to burrow deep into the Martian crust. Meanwhile, its onboard sensors will scan and test all the material it gathers and beam the information back to Earth.

The rover will spend two years analyzing rocks and soil to determine whether the necessary ingredients for life did exist at one point, even if billions of years ago, on Mars, a planet that has long been considered most similar to Earth.

Curiosity is part of a long and sweeping scientific dream of someday landing people on a distant planet known only through imagination and speculation, and, quite possibly, colonizing it. (Bradbury wrote of humans fleeing a troubled and soon-to-be-devastated Earth and settling on Mars; the next generations may eventually see another case of life imitating art.) The rover’s landing after a complicated, heart-stopping descent is truly significant, illustrating the best in humankind—its determination to reach for something seemingly beyond human abilities and to achieve it through a combination of evolution, technical revolution, profound courage, boundless perseverance—to speak nothing of awesome amounts of money.

In this mission of exploration, humankind is the thrilled, albeit unseen, passenger in Curiosity.