a look at the new Mars Rover

I got a glimpse of the new Mars rover, Curiosity, in the clean room while taking a tour of the JPL a few months ago. Unlike the last Mars rover, which landed with the aid of a parachute and air bags, this one is going to be lowered down on a cable from another stage which hovers above. It’ll be powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) instead of solar panels, so dust getting on the rover shouldn’t be an issue. It’s got a pretty neat and tiny X-ray diffraction instrument on board – if you’ve ever been to a university lab that has one, you’ll know that they’re normally the size of an entire bench. I thought initially that inXitu had used the field emission from carbon nanotubes to produce the X-rays, but it seems like it uses a miniature X-ray tube that consumes just 10 Watts of power.