Curiosity Will Carry Your Name to Mars!

Yes indeed! Those how enrolled to this competition will have the chance that now, on Saturday, november 26 2011, their names will get to Mars with the help of Curiosity rover; the possibility of sending your name to mars started back in 2009.  

Nasa will launch its car-size Curiosity rover this week in it's most expensive and scientifically complicated bid yet to discover if there was ever life on Mars.

Curiosity, which is the prize of Nasa's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission, will be launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Saturday.

'This is a Mars scientist's dream machine,' Ashwin Vasavada, MSL deputy project scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, told reporters at a press conference on November 10. 

Curiosity: Nasa will launch its car size rover this Saturday, in this picture the rover examines a rock on Mars with a set of tools at the end of the rover's arm, which extends about 2 meters.

'This rover is not only the most technically capable rover ever sent to another planet, but it's actually the most capable scientific explorer we've ever sent out.'
Curiosity started it's life designed in 2004 and at one ton it weighs five times more than its Mars rover predecessors Spirit and Opportunity.
During the 23 months after landing, Curiosity will analyze dozens of samples drilled from rocks or scooped from the ground as it explores with greater range than any previous Mars rover.

Mission of discovery: Highlighted Russian-built, neutron-shooting instrument on the Curiosity rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will check for water-bearing minerals in the ground beneath the rover.

Launch: Nasa graphic detailing the launch (which has now been delayed to Saturday) and the arrival back to earth

Curiosity will also carry the most advanced load of scientific gear ever used on Mars’ surface, a more than 10 times as massive as those of earlier Mars rovers.

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Curiosity is about twice as long and five times as heavy as NASA’s twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, launched in 2003. 
But it inherited many design elements from them, including six-wheel drive, a rocker-bogie suspension system and cameras mounted on a mast to help the mission’s team on Earth select exploration targets and driving routes. 


Unlike earlier rovers, Curiosity carries equipment to gather samples of rocks and soil, process them and distribute them to onboard test chambers inside analytical instruments.
It has a robotic arm which deploys two instruments, scoops soil, prepares and delivers samples for analytic instruments and brushes surfaces.
Its assignment is to investigate whether conditions have been favorable for microbial life and for preserving clues in the rocks about possible past life.
The goal of the mission is to assess whether the landing area has ever had or still has environmental conditions favorable to microbial life.
Curiosity will land near the foot of a layered mountain inside Gale crater, layers of this mountain contain minerals that form in water.
The portion of the crater floor where Curiosity will land has an alluvial fan likely formed by water-carried sediments.

Size: Showing the scale of the car-size rover against a 7ft man

Selection of Gale followed consideration of more than 30 locations by more than 100 scientists participating in a series of open workshops.
Because the Gale landing site is so close to the crater wall, it would not have been considered safe if the mission were not using this precision.
Advancing the technologies for precision landing of a heavy payload will yield research benefits beyond the returns from Mars Science Laboratory itself.
Those same capabilities would be important for later missions both to pick up rocks on Mars and bring them back to Earth, and conduct extensive surface
exploration for Martian life.
NASA Television’s countdown launch commentary begins at 4:30 a.m. PST (7:30 a.m. EST) on November 26.



Environment Clean Generations
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The Future of Tractor Beams

The "tractor beam" approaches depend on precise shaping of the intensities of laser beams

US space agency Nasa has funded a study of "tractor beams" to gather samples for analysis in future missions.Environment Clean Generations

The $100,000 (£63,000) award will be used to examine three laser-based approaches to do what has until now been the stuff of science fiction.

Several tractor-beam ideas have been published in the scientific literature but none has yet been put to use.

Nasa scientist Paul Stysley says the approach could "enhance science goals and reduce mission risk".

"Though a mainstay in science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, laser-based trapping isn't fanciful or beyond current technological know-how," said Dr Stysley of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, whose group was awarded the research funding.

High-beam profile The team has identified three possible options to capture and gather up sample material either in future orbiting spacecraft or on planetary rovers.

One is an adaptation of a well-known effect called "optical tweezers" in which objects can be trapped in the focus of one or two laser beams. However, this version of the approach would require an atmosphere in which to operate.Environment Clean Generations

The other two methods rely on specially shaped laser beams - instead of a beam whose intensity peaks at its centre and tails off gradually, the team is investigating two alternatives: solenoid beams and Bessel beams.

The intensity peaks within a solenoid beam are found in a spiral around the line of the beam itself, while a Bessel beam's intensity rises and falls in peaks and troughs at higher distances from the beam's line.

Solenoid beams have already proven their "tractor beam" abilities in laboratory tests published in the journal Optics Express, but the pulling power of Bessel beams, presented on the preprint server Arxiv in February, remains to be proved experimentally.Environment Clean Generations

In all three cases, explained Dr Stysley, the effect is a small one - but it could in some instances outperform existing methods of sample gathering.

"[Current] techniques have proven to be largely successful, but they are limited by high costs and limited range and sample rate," he said. Environment Clean Generations

"An optical-trapping system, on the other hand, could grab desired molecules from the upper atmosphere on an orbiting spacecraft or trap them from the ground or lower atmosphere from a lander.

"In other words, they could continuously and remotely capture particles over a longer period of time, which would enhance science goals and reduce mission risk."

 by "environment clean generations"