Curiosity to explore Mars

Curiosity to explore Mars on Monday!

Starting at 8.30 am on Monday, 6^th August 2012, 4-hour live web-cast, will be accessible via Google Hangout on Air

Gujarat Science City organises outreach programmes on Mission to Mars exploration for students

The world's biggest extra-terrestrial explorer, NASA's Curiosity rover is all set to launch on our neighboring Red Planet Mars for a search evidence that the planet might once have been home to microscopic life.

With its rover named Curiosity, Mars Science Laboratory mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet. Curiosity prepares to make its historic descent to the surface of Mars, the Earth's inhabitants will be watching... and waiting.

 

Curiosity is the largest and most sophisticated vehicle ever sent to explore the surface of another planet.  With a landing system specially developed to lower the 900 kg rover safely to the Martian surface, Curiosity will be on its own for seven minutes as it descends towards Mars.

Curiosity’s two-year mission aims to assess if Mars' atmosphere can sustain life. The rover is equipped with tools, making it a chemist and detective that can sniff the air to understand its composition, drill, maneuver and analyze particles.

The Mars Exploration Program

Since our first close-up picture of Mars in 1965, spacecraft voyages to the Red Planet have revealed a world strangely familiar, yet different enough to challenge our perceptions of what makes a planet work. Every time we feel close to understanding Mars, new discoveries send us straight back to the drawing board to revise existing theories.

You'd think Mars would be easier to understand. Like Earth, Mars has polar ice caps and clouds in its atmosphere, seasonal weather patterns, volcanoes, canyons and other recognizable features. However, conditions on Mars vary wildly from what we know on our own planet.

Over the past three decades, spacecraft have shown us that Mars is rocky, cold, and sterile beneath its hazy, pink sky. We've discovered that today's Martian wasteland hints at a formerly volatile world where volcanoes once raged, meteors plowed deep craters, and flash floods rushed over the land. And Mars continues to throw out new enticements with each landing or orbital pass made by our spacecraft.

Celebrate the Curiosity Landing Live on Google +

Starting at 8.30 am on Monday, 6^th August 2012, 4-hour live web-cast, will be accessible via Google Hangout on Air that highlight the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity. During the web-cast, scientists, engineers and other experts will provide unique insight into the rover and the landing, and viewers will have the chance to interact and ask questions.

Celebrate Curiosity landing with a mission to Mars at Gujarat Science City:

If you are curious about Mars exploration, this series of activities can help your students and kids to learn more about Mars and how we explore worlds beyond our own.

We request one and all to bring your kids and friends together to the Hall of Space pavilion in Gujarat Science City for a Mission to Mars exploration, land on the Red Planet, take telescopes to zoom to Mars and other objects to passersby, or find a new way to share the science and excitement of our neighboring planet with others.

GUJARAT SCIENCE CITY

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