Ken Herkenhoff has waited eight years for this day.
Yet when the Mars Science Lander takes-off from the Kennedy Space Center on top an Atlas V rocket at 12:02 p.m., he will have no more control than the 13,500 other people gathered to watch.
Herkenhoff, a Flagstaff-based USGS planetary geologist, was involved in the original proposal for the latest Mars rover , which was submitted in 2004.
Now he will be a part of the Curiosity rover's ChemCam team, a camera that stares at the same spot as a laser burning rocks 20 feet away. The instrument then analyzes the chemical signature of the vapor cloud, helping scientists determine what the rocks are made of.
"It's very exciting," Herkenhoff said in an interview from Florida with the Daily Sun. "It's great to get it off the ground. We can't wait to get to Mars."
Because there's nuclear material on board, Herkenhoff and other launch spectators will have to watch from afar for safety reasons.
Herkenhoff says he's still examining calibration data so he can make sure the instrument is dialed in when it reaches the surface and that nothing was damaged during take-off, landing, or the nearly nine month journey.
"With any luck, we'll have really good news tomorrow," Herkenhoff said on Friday morning.
All operations will be run out of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California for the first 90 days. After that, Herkenhoff will be able to collect data from his office in Flagstaff.
Herkenhoff and other Flagstaff-based USGS planetary scientists were also involved in selecting Gale Crater as the rover's landing site.
The crater contains sediment layers several miles deep that Herkenhoff said will have a Grand Canyon like ability to give insights into the planet's climate history.
The crater's bottom layer consists of clay minerals that likely formed in early oceans on the planet, but subsequent layers show signs of an increasingly acidic environment as the water evaporated from drying lake beds.
Curiosity is expected to spend at least two Earth years conducting studies in various layers as it navigates the crater, hopefully giving insights into the possibilities of past or present life on the red planet.
"It's a good place to go, particularly for Mars Science Laboratory," Herkenhoff said.
Eric Betz can be reached at 556-2250 or ebetz@azdailysun.com .
No comments:
Post a Comment