Problem With Electronics Delays Launch of Mars Rover
NASA officials have delayed the launch of the first of two Mars landers by at least one week because of a problem detected in the cabling of both spacecraft.
The launch was scheduled for May 30 and has now been pushed to June 6, said Pete Theisinger, the project’s manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Tests on the Mars exploration rovers conducted at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., showed that the cabling that connects the computer to the lander and its housing could short out when the cables are cut, with explosive guillotines, during separation.
Fixing the problem to safeguard the electronics is relatively simple, but requires disassembly of the complex, tightly packed machinery inside the robots.
The launch of the second rover is scheduled for June 25 and is expected to be unaffected by the repairs.
Theisinger said the first rover to launch, MER-2, will head to Gusev crater, a Martian site rich in geological formations. The second, MER-1, will head to Meridiani, a plain scientists want to examine because of its large deposits of hematite, a mineral typically formed in water.
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