China s Mars probe successfully reaches red planet. Next up: NASA s Perseverance rover. By William Harwood
February 10, 2021 / 9:30 AM / CBS News
One day after UAE s Hope orbiter reached Mars, China s more ambitious Tianwen-1 spacecraft, carrying state-of-the-art instruments, a lander and a six-wheel rover, slipped into an orbit around the red planet Wednesday after a seven-month voyage from Earth.
Tianwen-1 s arrival came just eight days before NASA s $2.4 billion Perseverance rover enters the martian atmosphere and descends to the floor of Jezero Crater to look for signs of past microbial life in and around an ancient river delta and lakebed deposits.
Perseverance is the most technologically advanced spacecraft ever sent to Mars, but Tianwen-1, the first all-Chinese mission to the red planet and its most sophisticated space probe to date, demonstrates the growing maturity and reach of China s space program.
The Reason NASA Lost A Super Expensive Satellite Nasa/Getty Images
By Cody Copeland/Jan. 2, 2021 2:49 pm EDT
For a bunch of geniuses, the folks over at NASA sure have made some pretty boneheaded mistakes in the administration s more than six decades of space exploration. There was the time the administration teamed up with the Air Force on a foolhardy plot to nuke the moon just to show off to Russia. And the time they ignored engineer Roger Boisjoly about the faulty O-rings on the
Challenger, which tragically exploded just after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts on board. Then at the end of the 20th century, when NASA was getting really ambitious with its plans to explore Mars, it launched a pair of spacecraft that were unfortunately doomed from the get-go, and would end up costing the administration (i.e., the taxpayers) quite the pretty penny.
Bill Allen in JPL s Mars Yard
:Bill Allen in JPL s Mars Yard. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Download image ›
Bill Allen has thrived as the mechanical systems design lead for three Mars rover missions, but he got his start as a teenager sorting letters for the NASA center.
Don t tell Bill Allen he can t take risks.
Allen was just 17 years old when he first set foot on the grounds of NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to join the mailroom in the summer of 1981. Voyager had recently encountered Saturn, and the Lab was crawling with members of the media. It was like walking into a football stadium in the middle of the touchdown. It was electric, he says. This is something that doesn t go on anywhere else in the world, and to be immersed in it with your first footsteps was crazy. That alone was awe-inspiring.
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