Roving Mars Page #4

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a whole nother set of new designs -

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no less than three or four designs

we had to test

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in the three months that followed in

our mad rush to make it to the launch pad,

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We were running out of money,

we were running out of time,

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The drop was successful, The fact that

the parachute exploded - not a good thing,

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- l'd rather have it happen here thani,,,/i

- Mars, That's right,

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Unfortunately, strictly speaking,

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that chute that just exploded was the chute

that we were planning on taking to Mars,

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i( Squyres)/i Mars is a tough place

to send a spacecraft,

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The average temperature

is 60 degrees below zero,

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lt goes down to 1 00 below zero at night,

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There can be dust storms that darken

the skies for months at a time,

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But if the rovers make it,

they'll give us the experience

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of what it would be like to be on Mars,

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We'll be able to look off into the distance

and say, ''Yeah, l'd like to go there,''

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and then actually go

and see what we find,

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The rover's arm has the same

dimensions of a human arm -

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with a shoulder, an elbow and a wrist,

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The arm tucks up tight under the front

of the vehicle for when we drive around,

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but when we get to a rock

that we want to examine,

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the arm unstows and reaches out,

using all of its joints

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to place the instruments on a rock

and to begin to study them,

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The hand has four fingers,

One is a microscope,

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two are spectrometers to tell us

in detail what the rocks are made of,

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and the fourth one is called the RAT -

the Rock Abrasion Tool,

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To examine the rocks, we've got to

get to them, and Mars is very bumpy,

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So to deal with bumps, engineers came up

with a ''rocker-bogie'' suspension system,

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lt's a very clever design

that allows each of the six wheels

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