Astronomy

In last nights' Readers Club social class we discovered all about the latest robot sent to Mars to look for life (see below), and then read an excerpt from C. S. Lewis novel Out Of The Silent Planet, as a class, and debated weather life really exists there.

A great class. See you at the next one!

Matt

Curiosity rover (source: www.wikipedia.org)

The Curiosity rover is a car-sized Mars rover currently exploring Gale Crater, near the equator of Mars.

The rover is a nuclear-powered, mobile scientific laboratory, with dozens of instruments. It is part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission by the United States. The MSL mission has four main scientific goals: investigation of the Martian climate, geology, and whether Mars could ever have supported life, including investigation of the role of water. It is also useful preparation for future missions, perhaps a manned mission to Mars. Curiosity carries the most advanced payload of scientific equipment ever used on the surface of Mars.[9]

It launched on November 26, 2011 and successfully landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012 UTC (August 5, 2012 PDT, NASA mission control time).[10]

The rover is the largest to date, and is designed to examine whether life could have lived on Mars.[11] It is also designed to study minerals, look for water, and collect radiation data.[12] The NASA administrator said it will "blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars".