In principle this isn’t too hard to do. You really only need a computer program that calculates the orbital trajectories of the Earth, Mars and Curiosity. Working out the distance from this model is actually easy. To set the model up you need the orbital positions and speed of all three of them. The Earth and Mars can be found easily, Curiosity seems a tad harder. I’m guessing it must be on line somewhere?

What you can find online is Curiosity’s position on the sky as it heads to Mars. JPL has it’s incredibly useful solar system data accessible through the HORIZONS on-line system. While I’ve not been able to figure out (yet!) how to get it to give me the orbital data I want, I have been able to use it to plot Curiosity’s celestial coordinates for the next month (these are for Halifax, Nova Scotia). While I’m not suggesting anyone go out and look, here are the next 6 days for fun:

Date__(UT)__HR:MN R.A._(ICRF/J2000.0) DEC

2011-Nov-28 00:00 08 19 14.59 -00 25 54.0

2011-Nov-29 00:00 m 08 21 53.08 +00 24 00.4

2011-Nov-30 00:00 m 08 22 59.29 +00 46 26.5

2011-Dec-01 00:00 m 08 23 33.30 +00 59 40.4

2011-Dec-02 00:00 m 08 23 51.82 +01 08 43.7

2011-Dec-03 00:00 m 08 24 01.34 +01 15 34.3

This area on the sky is between the constellations Hydra, Monoceros and Canis Major. Utah amateur astronomer Patrick Wiggins took this series of images on the morning of November 27th one day after launch (you can see Curiosity moves from frame to frame in the middle of the image)

As an added bonus HORIZONS will also tell you some additional data about Curiosity:

* Spacecraft
Mass: 3,893 kilograms total at launch,
2,401-kilogram EDL system (aeroshell + fueled descent stage)
539-kilogram fueled cruise stage

Cruise vehicle (cruise stage, aeroshell, w/rover & descent stage)
Diameter: 14 feet, 9 inches (4.5 meters)
height: 9 feet, 8 inches (3 meters)

Rover name: Curiosity
Rover dimensions:
Length: 9 feet, 10 inches (3.0 meters) (not counting arm)
Width: 9 feet, 1 inch (2.8 meters)
Height at top of mast: 7 feet (2.1 meters)
Arm length: 7 feet (2.1 meters)
Wheel diameter: 20 inches (0.5 meter)
Mass : 899-kilogram rover
Power: radioisotope thermoelectric generator & lithium-ion batteries

OK, so I’m sure I can probably hunt through the data from HORIZONS to figure out the trajectory, and then figure this all out! I’m sure, however, that the trajectory file is probably accessible somewhere, as it’s quoted in the data from HORIZONS as “msl_spk_cruise_1126-1502-tzero_v1_dsnsch”. It’s out there… Somewhere… Time to do some digging…

Communicating with spacecraft is not easy. As the recent Phobos-Grunt disaster shows, once you lose contact getting it back is tough. The Earth’s rotation also means you can’t just rely upon one communication facility as every few hours it’s going to be pointing in the wrong direction. So you need a bunch of dishes dotted around the world. And that’s exactly what NASA’s Deep Space Network is, a system of three stations separated by 360/3=120 degrees apart on the Earth. There are dishes in:

Goldstone, in the Mohave Desert in California. The Goldstone facility actually contains five antennas, the biggest of which is the recently refurbished 70m “Mars” antenna. The name of this antenna actually comes from the face that it was first used to pick up the Mariner 4 spacecraft which had been lost by smaller antennas during its Mars fly-by. Since that time the dish has tracked Voyager 2 as it passed Uranus and Neptune as well as Spirit and Opportunity on Mars.

Robledo de Chavela, Spain which is about 60 km west of Madrid. (Note, the website is in Spanish, so unfortunately I couldn’t delve into as much detail as I hoped, and ironically it looks much better than the Goldstone website!).  This facility also has five antennas, including a 70m dish that weighs 8000 tons. Like the other two facilities, the receivers sit in an area that is somewhat bowl  shaped to shield it (as much as possible) from terrestrial radio interference.

Tidbinbilla, Australia which is about 30 km from Canberra (love the cows, this is farm land!). This station has the smallest number of active antennas, at three. Like the other two it’s largest dish is also 70m. Some film buffs probably remember the movie “The Dish” with Sam Neil, actually this facility isn’t the one referenced there. That was Honeysuckle Creek, which closed in 1981. In fact, there were once seven tracking stations across Australia.

Steering Curiosity is a bit like driving using your rear view mirror. The spacecraft relays signals back to the Earth and then course adjustments are sent back. Curiosity isn’t really looking for Mars or piloting toward it directly, instead that’s being handled through the DSN. Importantly, it has to be done with great accuracy, believe it or not sunlight will “push” Curiosity during it’s flight to Mars, and this needs to be taken into account (you don’t want to wind up hundreds of km off course). What’s more, by the time Curiosity reaches Mars and enters the atmosphere it needs to know very precisely where it is, any errors in position could be disasterous.  There’s only 70 kg of propellant to make course corrections, i.e. two tanks of gas in a 350 million mile journey!

Depending upon the precise launch time, NASA had a bunch of different possible trajectories all laid out. As it happens, Curiosity launched bang on the number one launch time of 10:02 am EST. With the trajectory laid out, it’s now a matter of tracking and making sure all the thruster burns happen on time. If you’re wondering, the thrusters are actually pretty low power, they have only 1 lb of thrust. Some of the maneuvers thus take hours of burn.

But by and large, getting Curiosity to Mars is routine. It’s been done before. And as I keep reminding everyone, the landing is where things get interesting!

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Curiosity launched today at 10:02 am (Update: according to a NASA Kennedy tweet the official liftoff time was 10:02:00.211 a.m. EST – how’s that for precision!?) on a partly cloudy but otherwise good day at the Cape. The weather threatened to put things off early in the day with a little bit more rain than expected in the area, but otherwise things seemed to go really well. It was actually pretty funny to hear a NASA weather forecast that mentioned the incoming cosmic ray flux: “The proton flux is within bounds”. You don’t hear that on CBC!

Omar Baez, the NASA Launch Manager, commented

“…All the right things that they wanted to do in those crucial few minutes happened like clockwork.”

“The Atlas and Centaur were flawless. They got us to where the satelite needed to go we hit the window right at the beginning and everything appears nominal for the flight.”

During the countdown they focused closely on the wind and some of the rain bearing clouds in the area, but there was nothing of note to report other than a small couple of telemetry issues.

The interplanetary injection burn, and separation of the Curiosity spacecraft from the Centaur rocket all seemed to go perfectly from the vantage point of the onboard camera on the rocket (you could see the happy faces in the control room!) Can’t find a video of this on line yet… Update! Here it is. The spacecraft was picked up by the Deep Space Network just minutes later.

You can see the whole launch sequence here – it was just a perfect lift-off on a great day for flying!

Relief! (If I feel that way, I can’t begin to feel how good all the scientists and engineers that have worked for years on this project must feel!) Now we wait 8 months for Curiosity to make it’s way to Mars. Inertia and gravity are in control of the spacecraft now. But… when it gets close to Mars, things get really interesting…

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This morning Cosmoboy realized that one important piece of equipment hadn’t been covered in the “Countdown” series: the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS). This is Canada’s contribution to Curiosity’s instrument suite! APXS was built in Richmond B.C. by MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd and the Principle Investigator is Dr Ralph Gellert at the University of Guelph. Dr Gellert actually designed a previous version of the instrument for Spirit and Opportunity, so he’s a bit of a star of the Canadian space instrumentation scene!

OK, so what does APXS actually do? Basically, APXS is an instrument for determining precisely what elements are present in a given sample. To do this APXS will rely on two techniques, Particle-Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE) and X-ray Fluorescence (XRF). PIXE relies upon the fact that fast moving alpha particles can knock electrons from the lowest energy levels of atoms right out of the atom itself. This leaves an atom with an unstable configuration of electrons, and one of the electrons in the high energy levels of the atom will now drop down to the low level one, emitting an X-ray as it does so. APXS has a detector to capture these X-rays and we can determine the elements in the sample by looking at the energy of the X-rays – each elements emits X-rays with very specific energies, an energy signature if you like. PIXE is good for detecting lighter elements, essentially sodium through to calcium.

APXS contains Curium 244 as a source of alpha particles. But it also decays into Plutonium 240 (one of the tracer elements people have looked for in tracking Fukushima emissions) which emits X-rays that can in turn excite X-ray emission in other atoms. This is called X-ray Fluorescence and the idea is pretty much the same as PIXE, accept instead of alpha particles causing the excitation, this time it is incoming X-rays. The two methods turn out to be very complementary though as XRF is good for detecting heavier elements, calcium through to zirconium.

OK, so that’s the science behind APXS. For it to work effectively you have to be able to get close to the sample. So the emitter and detector part of APXS sits on the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm while the main electronics are back in side the body of the rover. The APXS on Curiosity is also 3 to 6 times better than the ones on Spirit or Opportunity. It will take data much more rapidly, and quick tests for a few specific elements can be done in as little as 10 minutes – it used to take several hours. It can even take data during the day as well, because a special active cooler has been added.

The main science goals of APXS are similar to that of CheMin – to understand the elemental composition of Martian geology, what elements are present and in what concentrations? The high precision of APXS will also allow it to look for any local anomalies in elemental abundances, which will help pinpoint interesting areas for further sampling with SAM. There is also a possibility of combining results with CheMin to find X-ray invisible compounds like bound water or carbonates.

How expensive was APXS to build? I’ll present this in a way that puts the investment in context. Curiosity’s overall budget is about 2.5 billion dollars. Canada’s gross domestic product is about 1/10th that of the US. So if we collaborate on a project with the US, you would anticipate that we might contribute about 10% of the overall cost, or around $250 million. Well, we didn’t do that, so about half that, say $100 million? Nope, I may as well cut to the chase, we spent $17.8 million. OK, so that’s still a good sum of money, but from an international perspective it’s a pretty minimal investment: 0.6% of the overall mission cost. I’ve written at length about the funding for the Canadian Space Agency and how low it is, and that’s true regardless of which party is in power. Although things are about to get notably worse as the CSA budget is to be cut by almost 25% beginning in 2013. But at least we’re involved, it could be worse.

APXS is a great instrument, and you can be sure that once it starts taking data on Mars there’s going to be a lot of interesting new discoveries!

T-minus one hour and counting…. Go Curiosity!

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This is the final post in the “Countdown” series. Tomorrow Curiosity will begin its long journey to Mars. While the launch is a nerve wracking time for anyone involved, perhaps the most scary part of the mission is the landing. Curiosity will attempt to land on Mars using a method that’s never been used before: lowering down to the surface using a crane from a platform that is hovering under rocket power. If that sounds like it’s difficult to do – it is! NASA has a really neat movie of how it is all supposed to work.

Let’s quickly talk about the landing site first. Many of you will recall that during the Apollo missions the lunar module was piloted down to the surface. Neil Armstrong was actually seconds away from running out of fuel while he looked for a good place to put down Apollo 11, imagine what a disaster that could have been… Without the benefit of a human pilot, Curiosity needs to land in a region that’s relatively free of hazards. Fortunately, a series of surveyor satellites has given us incredible knowledge of the surface of Mars and the chosen site of Gale Crater has both good landing areas as well as a lot of interesting geography (including an alluvial fan likely deposited by water carrying sediments).

But let’s get back to the interesting bit, the landing procedure itself. Imagine hurtling toward a planet at tens of thousands of kilometers an hour. Your millions of miles away from the Earth and there’s no human pilot to plot a course once you’re inside the atmosphere to avoid any unexpected events. Sounds pretty risky, yeah? And it is… Beagle 2 was the last surface mission to fail (and we think we found the wreckage), but just four years earlier two missions, Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, both failed as well. If you want statistics, NASA has landed on Mars successfully five (yes only five) times! And when it comes to Curiosity, the landing procedure that’s been chosen is more complex than any other mission before it…

While the Apollo missions entered into orbit around the Moon, Curiosity is going to slow down from interplanetary speeds without this step. In this sense its landing will be somewhat similar to the Apollo “splashdowns” on Earth. Thus Curiosity is going to hit the Martian atmosphere travelling at over 20,000 km per hour, and again, just like the Apollo missions, the spacecraft carrying Curiosity has a heat shield underneath to protect the rover from the extreme heat (a peak of 2100 C) produced in re-entry. All the steps that follow are given on this great graphic provided by NASA:

Once into the atmosphere Curiosity will begin a series of maneuvers at several times the speed of sound, before deploying its parachute while still at supersonic speeds. This part of the descent is anticipated to go pretty well. Supersonic breaking parachutes have been used since the Mercury missions in late 1950s early 1960s so the technology is nothing new.

But once Curiosity has descended to about 1.8 km above the surface, and is travelling at aroud 400 km per hour, it will separate from the parachute and begin a powered descent. In about 40 seconds it will be down to just 20m above the Mars surface, and then perhaps the most risky part of the whole mission begins: lowering to the surface on the end of a “sky crane”. Curiosity can’t just be “dropped” – it’s too heavy at almost 1 ton in mass. Once the sky crane is fully deployed the spacecraft will slowly descend down at about 0.75m per second. Once it detects that Curiosity is on the ground it will cut the lines on the crane and fly away at least 150 m away from the rover.

Amazingly, all this is going to be filmed. The MARDI descent camera will take 4 images per second during the maneuvers. If it all works, this is going to be one heck of a movie!

So, one day to go for the launch… Can’t wait for Curiosity to begin its journey!!!

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Yesterday we talked about the weather measurement experiments on Curiosity: the REMS package. Today we’ll focus an experiment that is going to measure the water and mineral content of Mars just below the surface. The name of the instrument is DAN, for Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons. The name may sound complicated, but the science behind the instrument is actually a simple idea.

DAN works in a quite ingenious way. If you fire high energy neutrons at a material then those neutrons will interact with the atomic nuclei in the material and either be absorbed or scattered in a certain direction. As it turns out, materials containing lots of hydrogen (which is typically locked up in either water or minerals) will slow down these high energy neutrons very efficiently and as a result the neutrons that are scattered will tend to be much lower energy than from regions with less hydrogen. That’s the basis of the experiment: fire neutrons at the ground and see what type of neutrons come back to your detector. If you get lots of low energy neutrons it means there’s a lot of water and minerals down there.

Life is always complicated though. So the big problem for Curiosity is that Mars is actually being bombarded constantly by cosmic rays which can create fast moving neutrons in the Martian surface. So any experiment you do has to be able to filter this effect out. DAN will actually do that using two detectors, one of which will block the low energy neutrons while the other will measure all the neutrons (including those generated by the cosmic rays). Subtract the two signals and you get the amount of low energy neutrons that are coming back.

How will DAN actually create the neutrons it fires into the ground? It will do so using a nuclear reaction of two types of hydrogen isotopes (tritium and deuterium) that will produce a helium nucleus plus a neutron as a result. This fusion reaction (deuterium is fired at a source containing tritium) will be very precisely controlled to produce a short pulse of neutrons that lasts about one millionth of a second. Once the neutrons have been fired then DAN switches over to follow the returning neutrons using its detectors. It will take data from 1 microsecond after the pulse through to about 10 milliseconds later.

But the neat thing about using a pulse is that you can figure out the distribution of water below the surface. The basic idea is you know exactly when the neutrons were fired and when the scattered neutrons were detected. Depending upon the depth of the water/mineral concentration the scattered neutrons will show up either earlier or later and in different amounts. From this time dependent signal we’ll be able to figure out just how deep the water is (at least down to about ~0.5m, the limit of what DAN can probe).

DAN’s overall role in MSL is pretty important. It’s going to provide a very clear picture of the overall water/mineral content just below the surface wherever Curiosity goes. It’s got over 10 million shots stored, so there isn’t too much worry about it being “used up” too quickly. It can also be used during traverses as well, there’s no need to stop and take a measurement. And on top of figuring out the subsurface water, DAN can also be used to look at the overall flux of neutron radiation background in the Mars environment. It’s a pretty neat little instrument.

Tomorrow: The impressive but risky descent…

The Martian atmosphere is both very thin and much lower pressure than the Earths (the average pressue is about 150 times lower than at sea level on Earth). The elemental composition is very different too, Mars’ atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide (95%) and there is only a tiny fraction of oxygen (0.1%). Combined with a variation of surface temperature from -87 C through to (very localized) highs of 30 C in the southern regions (although mean surface temps are around -60 C), Mars is expected to have some quite unique planetary weather.

For our weather forecasts on Earth we like to know temperature, wind speed, humidity, atmospheric pressure and some times the UV levels. So it will come as no surprise that’s pretty much what Curiosity is going to measure. In fact, Curiosity will measure the following six atmospheric parameters: wind speed/direction, pressure, relative humidity, air temperature, ground temperature, and ultraviolet radiation.

Anyone who has worked at a weather station knows that you need to put sensors measuring wind speed (for example) slightly above the ground to get away from surface effects. The two wind speed sensors thus sit on Curiosity’s Remote Sensing Mast (on two separate booms, one pointing forward and another at 120 degrees to the first), along with humidty and air & ground temperature sensors. Placing the booms at different angles ensures that at least one of them will record accurate wind data for any given wind direction. Note, even on the mast the wind measurements will still be slightly impacted by air flow around the mast itself. The wind speed measurements will be pretty accurate, with a resolution of around 0.5 m/s. The directional measurements are anticipated to be accurate to within 30 degrees or so, and it will even measure vertical variation in wind direction to within 10 degrees.

Even though the ground temperature sensor is up on the mast, it can still measure the temperature of the ground by pointing toward a patch to the side of the rover. The temperature sensor is an electrical one, a thermopile, and can record in a temperature range of 150-300K with an accuracy of around 10K. The air temperature measurements made on the boom itself will be twice as accurate (to within 5K) over the same temperature range. The pressure and humidity sensors complete the instrument suite on the mast.

Since the UV sensor is designed to measure the incoming UV from above the rover, it sits on top of the rover deck to the back. Much like the radiation assessment detector (RAD) the UV sensors are sensitive to incoming radiation across about a 60 degree cone above the rover. The sensor itself will be able to detect UV in six different wavelength ranges, (from UVA through to UVE, plus a “total dose” across the entire range) and will thus characterize the UV environment in great detail.

But really the great “value add” behind all these measurements is that Curiosity will make them systematically every hour. So for each hour of each Martian day, Curiosity will record 5 minutes of data from all the sensors. To do this REMS has been set up to work independently of the main power sources on Curiosity and can take data even when the rover is in a sleep mode.

From all this data we’ll be able to develop detailed models of Martian weather patterns, with a detailed focus both on large scale fronts and smaller, so called microscale weather systems. The microscale systems include small whirlwinds like dust devils. We’ll also uncover precisely how the Martian water cycle works, and it’s going to be seriously different from the Earth’s!

And to whet your appetite for all this new Martain weather data, here’s a beautiful Martian sunset taken by the Spirit Rover. Tomorrow: DAN.

Yesterday we talked about the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments. Today we’ll talk about a simpler, but nonetheless important piece of equipment: the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD). Data from RAD will provide the first measurements of radiation on the surface of Mars (it will also operate during the flight to Mars) and allow us to answer a very important question for any human missions: What would be the radiation dose on the surface? Knowing this answer is a big deal: unlike the Earth, Mars does not have a big magnetic field to shield it, or a thick atmosphere to shield against cosmic rays.

RAD will measure the three main types of radiation, alpha, beta and gamma. Alpha radiation, which is the easiest radiation to shield against, corresponds to particles containing two neutrons and protons (the same as a helium nuclei). Beta radiation, which is slightly harder to shield against than alpha particles, corresponds to high energy electrons or positrons. While gamma radiation corresponds to high energy photons, and, depending upon the energy of the photons, can need inches of lead to provide adequate shielding. In addition to these forms of radiation, RAD will also detect cosmic rays which are made of high energy atomic nuclei stripped of their electrons as well as other particles such as neutrons. For the experts, here is a graph of the energy coverage for each of the different particles RAD will detect:

RAD will sit on top of the body of Curiosity. It isn’t very big, roughly the size of coffee can, and at first take isn’t all that impressive looking. It’s essentially a very short and “stubby” telescope with detectors behind it that will capture the various particles associated with the radiation. The particles are detected by essentially two methods: The first is through a process called scintillation, whereby the energetic particles in the radiation cause a target material to undergo luminescence when hit (the light is then detected). The second method is through striking a semi-conducting material which creates an electric current that can be detected. It’s also possible to use these interactions to determine the overall energy of the incoming particle. In all, RAD contains five separate detectors which combine to give it both an excellent coverage in terms of the energies of incoming particles, and also the specific types of radiation. RAD is sensitive to particles coming in from above through about a 65 degree cone of coverage.

While RADs measurements will enable us to determine how hazardous the Martian environment is for humans, this data can also be used to determine what kind of life could survive on the surface now, and also in the past as well (it’s even possible to calculate how far down into the Martian surface life would have to be to avoid any lethal radiation levels). The radiation levels can also be used to infer what kind of mutation risks the environment presents for lifeforms based on DNA. Lastly, from all the new data it will be possible to determine how much of an impact the radiation background has had on the chemistry and isotopes in the Martian environment.

Bottomline: from the human exploration persepective, RAD well tell us just how inhospitable the Martian environment is!

Tomorrow: the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS).

SAM is actually a suite of three main instruments plus some sub-systems that sit within the body of the rover. It has an inlet on the top that is fed by the robotic arm part of the sample acquisition system, but it can also sample the atmosphere directly through a pair on inlet tubes.

The first instrument we’ll talk about is QMS, the Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer. Mass spectrometers work on the principle that the deflection of a particle in an electric field is determined by the ratio of its mass to its electrical charge. Notice that the particles must have an electric charge, which means that the particles in the sample need to be ionized (i.e. have electrons removed from them). The stream of particles is passed through the electric field and only particles of a certain mass to charge ratio then reach the collector. With a little effort the exact masses of the atoms can then be determined. The Quadrupole name of the system comes from the electric field geometry being a quadrupole between four rods.

The TLS instrument (Tunable laser spectrometer, sometimes called TDLAS) is another type of spectrometer that is specially designed for handling gases. This type of spectrometry measures the amount of molecules present by essentially determining how much light of given wavelength is absorbed. The wavelength of the light is determined beforehand to correspond to a specific molecule. If you have more absorption, you have more of that molecule present. The TLS on Curiosity will target measurements of methane (CH4), water (H20) and carbon dioxide (CO2), and will be able to measure their concentrations to levels of parts per billion in some cases.

The last main instrument in SAM, is the GC for gas chromatography. Gas chromatography applies to organic compounds that will evapourate into a gas (in this case Helium) and then rise up through that gas. Different compounds will “rise”, strictly speaking the gas passes through a wound spiral tube so perhaps “travel” is better, at different rates allowing them to be separated. If the rates are known beforehand then the molecules present can be determined. This process can also be used to feed into the QMS to provide combined “CGMS”. GCMS is a very powerful method because it combines the best of GC, i.e. separating different compounds, with the ability to determined the pieces that make up the compound itself (through mass spectroscopy).

So those are instruments, what are the experiments going to address? Direct from the Goddard website, the goals can be summarized as follows:

1. Question 1: What does the inventory of carbon compounds near the surface of Mars tell us about its potential habitability?
   1. Goal 1: Survey carbon compound sources and evaluate their possible mechanism of formation and destruction.
   2. Goal 2: Search for organic compounds of biotic and prebiotic importance expecially methane.

1. Question 2: What are the chemical and isotopic states of the lighter elements in the solids and atmosphere of Mars and what do they tell us about its potential habitability?
   1. Goal 3: Reveal the chemical and isotopic state of elements (i.e., N, H, O, S and others) that are important for life as we know it.
   2. Goal 4: Evaluate the habitability of Mars by studying its atmospheric chemistry and the composition of trace species that are evidence of interactions between the atmosphere and soil.

1. Question 3: Were past habitability conditions different from today’s?
   1. Goal 5: Understand atmospheric and climatic evolution through measurements of noble gas and light element isotopes.

SAM is the experiment that will follow up on the questions posed by the Viking landers: even if there isn’t life now, are the building blocks for life there?

Tomorrow: the radiation assessment detector (RAD).

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Curiosity’s launch has been delayed from Friday November 25th to 10:02 am Saturday the 26th. The delay is due to a battery change in the Flight Termination system of the Atlas V launch vehicle. Flight Termination systems are a key part of range safety (rockets frequently do veer off course!) so this is a pretty big deal.

So rather than writing about an experiment today, let’s take a closer look at some of the launch details and any dangers that might be lurking there.

What if it all blows up? Well other than being a huge disappointment for thousands of people that have worked on the project, there are a number of hazardous materials on the rocket. From the press perspective, I’m sure the most play would be given to the 3.5 kg of Plutonium 238 that is actually Curiosity’s main power source.

But there’s really very little cause for concern. 238Pu is what’s known as an alpha emitter – it emits alpha particles (essentially helium nuclei, containing two protons and two neutrons). From a particle physics perspective, these are comparatively large objects that will interact easily with material around them. Thus they don’t penetrate far, even a few inches of air or paper is enough to protect against small sources of alpha particle radiation. That’s considerably different to say gamma radiation emitters which can penetrate inches of lead (depending on their energy).

In short, NASA estimates there’s about a 1 in 400 chance of material being released during the launch. Anyone who was exposed to this material would actually receive a radiation dose far below that we receive in a year from natural sources. For the experts, the maximum dose expected for an individual in the launch range is 0.23 rem (as compared to 0.14 rem/day being average exposure from solar and cosmic radiation). For the dose to be fatal, it would need to be over two hundred times higher, and that is simply not going to happen – there isn’t enough material on board, and it’s type of radiation is easily shielded.

It’s worth pointing out that NASA launches have to undergo an environmental assessment (here is the one for Curiosity). These issues are taken very seriously and each launch has a list of hazardous materials that are on board. According to NASA documentation each Atlas V launcher (i.e. neglecting the payload) includes 4.7 tons of hazardous waste. In case you were wondering, here’s the list!

Material                                                                         Quantity
Petroleum, oil, lubricants                                    2177 kg (4790 lb)
VOC-based primers, topcoats, coatings            145 kg (320 lb)
Non-VOC based primers, topcoats, coatings   86 kg (190 lb)
VOC-based solvents, cleaners                             627 kg (1380 lb)
Non VOC-based solvents, cleaners                    432 kg (950 lb)
Corrosives                                                                2500 kg (5500 lb)
Adhesives, sealants                                                1036 kg (2280 lb)
Other                                                                         291 kg (640 lb)
Electron QED cleaner                                            5.7 liter (5 qt)
MIL-P-23377 primer                                              2.8 liter (5 pt)
Silicone RTV-88                                                      45 liter (10 gal)
Electric insulating enamel                                    0.1 kg (5 oz)
Acrylic primer                                                          22 liter (5 gal)
Conductive paint                                                     45 liter (10 gal)
Chemical conversion coating                                0.3 kg (10 oz)
Cork-filled potting compound                              5.7 liter (5 qt)
Epoxy adhesive                                                        5.7 liter (5 qt)

So how likely is a launch problem? Looking at the statistics of the Atlas V rocket, it’s had 27 launches and 1 failure. That’s close to a 4% failure rate, which is actually pretty good. The probability of anything going wrong on the range itself is low – thankfully!

Of course there are mission risks far beyond the launch itself. The recent Phobos-Grunt problems serve as a good reminder that there are plenty of things that can go wrong on a mission to Mars – this is rocket science…

Tomorrow, provided there are no further delays , Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM).