The real action may have been taking place 170.2 million kilometers away, but the Taipei Astronomical Museum was active yesterday morning, as a capacity crowd packed the facilities' IMAX theater for a live satellite relay of the landing of the first of twin missions to Mars.
Director of research for the museum, Gir Be-young (
"They call it `six minutes of terror' because of the high risk that something might go wrong and the spacecraft would be lost," Gir said. "But I prefer to think of it as the six most exciting minutes."
But for audiences tuning in from Taiwan -- and hundreds of other places around the world -- those six minutes stretched across nearly an hour, giving local scientists barely enough time to explain the basics of the mind-boggling amount of science behind the mission.
As Spirit entered Mars' thin atmosphere at 2:03pm local Mars time on Jan. 4, its signal was received by JPL at 8:35pm Pacific Time on Jan. 3, before being announced to the waiting world. While each of those transmissions took only moments to be received, scientists have waited nearly seven months since Spirit was launched from Cape Canaveral Florida on June 10 last year.
Those seven months, the several years of preparation preceding them and some US$820 million were all at risk of being lost in a flash as the cruiser vehicle carrying Spirit sped into the Martian atmosphere at 5,400 meters per second, reaching a surface temperature nearly as hot as the surface of the sun.
The problem scientists faced was how to diminish all that speed and heat so that Spirit would land on Mars -- crash land, that is -- and properly function as a so-called robotic geologist for the next three months of its mission.
Their solution was to slow the spacecraft during its descent in several stages. First, a parachute deployed behind the cruiser as it traveled at about 1,600kph, reducing its speed to a mere 400kph.
Moments later, the vehicle jettisoned its heat shield and rapelled down a 20m bridal, moving away from a unit containing retro rockets that slowed the craft down to nearly a standstill some 20m above the surface of the planet.
At that point, the bridal was cut and a protective shell of airbags inflated and the craft, resembling a giant bunch of grapes, plummeted the remaining distance and bounced some half a kilometer from its initial point of impact before coming to a stop, six terrifying minutes later, on the surface of Mars.
While the action didn't make hearts pound as it was relayed to audiences at Taipei's astronomy museum, the news that Spirit had landed successfully nonetheless created an uproar of applause from audiences in Taipei, Taitung and Kaohsiung.
And if those six minutes were the longest many had ever experienced, the next stage will be all the longer as Spirit, like a catapillar in metamorphosis, sheds its protective cocoon, unfolds its solar panels and rolls away on its scientific journey.
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