Earth to Mars: How NASA Keeps Curiosity Connected (Mars Report)
NASA’s Curiosity rover is exploring a scientifically exciting area on Mars, but communicating with the mission team on Earth has recently been a challenge due to both the current season and the surrounding terrain. In this Mars Report, Curiosity engineer Reidar Larsen takes you inside the uplink room where the team talks to the rover. See why Curiosity’s location in Gediz Vallis channel makes it difficult to send direct commands — and how the team ensures they always stay connected to the rover.
Curiosity landed in 2012 to look for evidence that Mars’ Gale Crater had the conditions to support microbial life in the ancient past. Curiosity has confirmed those conditions existed on the crater floor as well as on various parts of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain within the crater that the rover has been ascending since 2014.
For more about Curiosity, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/
Transcript
Reidar Larsen, flight systems engineer, JPL
If you like to explore the great outdoors, you know that getting a cellphone signal can sometimes be tricky, and the Curiosity rover can relate.
Right now, it's exploring a scientifically important area on Mars. But talking to Earth has been a serious challenge. I'm going to explain what's going on and how we stay connected to Curiosity.
We're here in Curiosity's uplink room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This is where we develop the commands we beam to the rover.
There are two ways we communicate with Curiosity. We relay information through satellites orbiting Mars. Or we send a direct signal from Earth to the rover's high-gain antenna.
We use the orbiters when Curiosity has a lot of information to share, like the pictures we stitch together to make these amazing panoramas.
But it’s easier to talk directly from Earth through the antenna when we need to share smaller amounts of information, like a list of daily commands to the rover, telling it to wake up and drive.
The trick is making sure the antenna can point to Earth. And that hasn't been easy lately.
Right now Curiosity is exploring Gediz Vallis channel. This is where it discovered pure sulfur for the first time ever on Mars.
But there's a huge mountain to our east and it could block our line of sight to the rover's antenna.
Curiosity knows how to point its antenna at Earth, but it doesn't know about the mountain.
Normally, Earth is very high in the Martian sky when we talk to Curiosity. But right now, Mars and Earth are in a season when the Earth appears much lower in the sky. And the Earth can disappear behind the mountain.
Luckily, Curiosity's team has special tools and mapping software. The dark-shaded regions show where the eastern mountain would block signals from Earth. This helps us know what time of day to send commands.
Starting in September, Earth will begin to rise in the Martian sky. And the rover will begin driving away from the eastern mountain.
So pretty soon, talking to Curiosity will get a lot easier. Just like getting a cellphone signal on your hike.