Introduction:
The Mas rover is an automated motor vehicle that travels around the planet Mars for various reasons. Throughout the years, starting in 1971. The Soviet Union were the first country to send a Mars rover to Mars following over the years with European Union and the United States sending their own rovers to Mars. With the latest Mars, the Curiosity. The overall cost for its project was $2.5 billion USD using taxpayer dollars. The first ever Mars rover, the “Mars 2” failed its landing on the 27 November 1971 after it lost contact with the rover. The latest Mars rover, the ‘Curiosity’ landed on Mars on the 6th August 2012. In a crater within the area called Aeolis Palus. The size of the rover is 2.1 metres high, 3 metres long and 2.8
…show more content…
Mostly to provide information to Earth the possibility of discovering previous life signs on Mars. The Mars rover is equipped with drills to take samples from the ground and turn it into powder. Drilling into the ground is a concern because it’s an unidentified substance. So the compound properties of the ground could break the drill. The design team must have realized that they might encounter this problem. As a precaution the rover is equipped with two spare drills on-board that can be swapped internal by the rover if required.
Sending back the information collected by the Mars rover is vital about learning Mars. As well as controlling from a huge amount of distance. Making communication with the Curiosity is an important part of the mission. The rover is set with a three aerial system, an ultra-high (UHF), high and low frequency antenna attached on-board. The Mars rover can use the three different antennas to receive and send signals/information back to each other but used for optimised usage of only sending or receiving signals. So if one fails the others can take its place.
Decisions regarding
…show more content…
The use of the three aerial system equipped on-board has advantages and benefits that keeps the communication system with the Curiosity reliable. The optimized usage of the aerial system to send back radio waves through the UHF antenna and the high-gain to receive the signal from Earth. The low-gain antenna can do the best of both receiving and sending signals in any direction (omni-directional). Although, it is sent at a slow rate to the Deep Space Network on