Mars Rover, taken by aliens? or just broken ?

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NASA fears they could lose contact with the multi million dollar Mars Rover when it touches down in August. sources suggest plans are in place by NASA boffins to deal with everything from flat battery,  an electrical fail and even being taken by Aliens.

 

The fact that NASA has such plans should open up a real conspiracy theory outburst. However the bigger issue now is they could lose contact before it lands.

NASA could lose touch with its latest Mars  rover just as it attempts to land on the red planet on 6 August. The Curiosity vehicle, which is the size of a  car, is aiming for a deep depression known as Gale Crater.

The US space agency will be tracking the  descent with satellites, but today admitted its key craft could be in the wrong  place.

Engineers have been tackling a fault on the  Odyssey satellite and it is no longer in the best observational  orbit.

 

The team are now in a frantic race to move it  back in the next three weeks, or Nasa will lose signal to the rover just as it  is about to touch down.

Engineers today tried to play down the gaffe,  claiming it will not affect the outcome of the landing because Curiosity’s  descent manoeuvres are all performed automatically.

‘Odyssey right now looks like it may not be  in the same spot that we’d expected it to be,’ said Doug McCuistion, the  director of Nasa’s Mars exploration programme.

‘There may be some changes in real-time  communication. We’ll let you know as this develops; we still have more work to  do. But keep in mind, there is no risk to [Curiosity] landing. It does not have  an effect on that.’

A recent study suggested that just digging  inches beneath the surface could  uncover complex organic molecules that could  show that life once existed on Mars.

The rover, in a protective capsule, will hit  the top of the Martian atmosphere at 20,000km/h (13,000mph) and attempt to slow  to just one metre per second to execute a soft touchdown.

The landing system includes a supersonic  parachute and a rocket-powered crane.

It was expected that the Odyssey orbiter  would track the whole descent, relaying UHF signals from the rover right up to  the landing and for a few minutes beyond.

The scoop on Curiosity, which is due to  arrive on Mars in August, will dig four  inches beneath the surface – enough to  find the complex building blocks  of life, particularly in new craters excavated  by recent asteroid  impacts.

Some scientists such as Jay Melosh of  Purdue  University believe that life may even have originated on Mars,  then been  carried to Earth on asteroids.

Stick a shovel in the ground and scoop.  That’s about how deep scientists need to go in order to find evidence for  ancient life on Mars, if there is  any to be found, a new study  suggests.

The results suggest that, should Mars harbor  simple organic molecules,  NASA’s prospects for discovering them during  Curiosity’s explorations  are better than previously thought, said Alexander  Pavlov of the NASA  Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, lead  author of the  study.

Complex organic molecules could hint more  strongly at the possibility of past life on the planet. These molecules, made up  of 10 or more carbon atoms, could resemble known building blocks of life such as  the amino acids that make up proteins.

 

Read more: Daily Mail