IT’S been a long time since I dipped into the space file and since that’s the file that’s really near and dear to my heart, it’s time. I am honored to be a Solar System Ambassador. One of the things I do is participate in their wonderful webinars and pass that direct information on to you. Last week, we learned about the latest rover mission to Mars, and the astounding way they plan to land it.

Our Mars rovers just keep getting bigger and bigger. Sojourner, the first Mars rover, launched in the 1990s, was about two feet across. Spirit and Opportunity, the next pair of explorers, have decks the size of card tables and although Spirit stopped phoning home two years ago, Opportunity is still going strong. Spirit and Opportunity landed in (are you ready?) 2004 for a one-year mission. I think both these rovers deserve a round of applause!

The next rover is called Curiosity and it’s already on its way to Mars. This one isn’t card table-sized, it’s car-sized and the folks at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have come up with a novel way to land all that weight. Spirit and Opportunity were encased in air bags and they bounced their way to a safe landing. Curiosity is far too heavy for balloons, so they’re bringing her down with rockets.

The landing spacecraft will first deploy a parachute. After that slows the free fall a bit, the engines on board the descent stage will fire and fly the rover down to within a mile of the surface. The rover will then be lowered from the bottom of the descent stage on three ropes called a ‘bridle.’ The configuration is called the ‘sky crane.’

When the sky crane senses that the rover has touched down, the bridle is cut and the sky crane flies a safe distance from the rover before it crash lands.

Unfortunately, I can see a lot of places where this could go wrong and I wish NASA the best of luck when touchdown occurs next August. This rover is set up to do a lot of complex science and I’ll be rooting for Curiosity all the way.

You may remember that the Russians also launched a Mars mission at the same time that Curiosity went up last fall. You may also remember that Phobos Grunt (gotta love those Russian names!) failed to leave orbit and eventually re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned.

What you probably don’t know is that Phobos Grunt went directly over Guam about half an hour before it augured into the southern Pacific off the coast of South America. It happened on the morning of Jan. 16, so if you saw a bright streak of light in the sky sometime between 3:30 and 4 a.m., guess what it was?

And there’s other interesting news about Spirit and Opportunity. They both have rock drilling tools just like Curiosity does and there’s an interesting story about the collars that protect the drill cables. In September 2001, Honeybee Robotics employees in lower Manhattan were building the grinding tools for Spirit and Opportunity. And of course, we all remember what happened in Manhattan in September of 2001.

The aluminum cuffs that serve as cable shields on each of the rock abrasion tools on Spirit and Opportunity were made from aluminum recovered from the destroyed World Trade Center towers. The metal bears the image of an American flag and is a fitting tribute to the people who died on Sept. 11. One day, both rovers will be silent. In the cold, dry environment of Mars, the onboard memorials to victims of the Sept. 11 attack could remain in good condition for millions of years.