NASA-JPL director Charles Elachi talks about latest Mars mission
The car-sized Mars rover Curiosity, which landed on the Red Planet last month, is the biggest, most expensive and most ambitious planetary mission in many years. But it is just one of a sweeping portfolio of past and future missions of pioneering planetary exploration managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., as JPL director Charles Elachi described in a talk at MIT on Monday.“Mars is only about 15 percent of what we do,” Elachi said, although it’s the project that has been garnering the lion’s share of attention this year — including a congratulatory phone call from President Barack Obama after the successful conclusion of Curiosity’s “seven minutes of terror” landing sequence. That landing used several innovative technologies, including a “sky crane” that gently lowered the rover to the Martian surface — all of which had to work perfectly for the landing to succeed.Curiosity’s 350-million-mile trek from...