Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission: NASA's Curiosity rover lands on Mars, 6th August 2012

[2hats]

MSL is much bigger, so should be an even more impressive shot

Relative slant ranges?

 

[Yetman]

Surely landing in a crater is going to be the last place you're going to find life, as it'll all have been destroyed by whatever made the crater? And if you do find life, it's likely to have come on the meteor or whatever rather than be native to Mars?

Still. Excellent stuff

 

[Crispy]

Relative slant ranges?

Good question.

 

[xes]

some lulz on b3ta main message board for this

 

[Crispy]

Surely landing in a crater is going to be the last place you're going to find life, as it'll all have been destroyed by whatever made the crater? And if you do find life, it's likely to have come on the meteor or whatever rather than be native to Mars?

Still. Excellent stuff

They're not looking for life itself, but evidence of conditions that could support life. The target is a crater because it reveals many historical strata of rock. The surface of mars is otherwise covered to a depth of many meters by rubble and dust, which obscures the historical record.

 

[dylans]

Interesting article here about the EDL leader Adam Steltzner. (that's Entry Descent and Landing, not the other EDL)

Steltzner's path to becoming team leader for this new Mars lander was hardly direct. Unlike many successful engineers, he struggled at school. An elementary school principal told him he wasn't very bright. His high school experience seemed to confirm that.
"I passed my geometry class the second time with an F plus, because the teacher just didn't want to see me again," he says.
His father told him he'd never amount to anything but a ditch digger, a remark he still carries with him years later.
Maybe that's because school wasn't a priority, particularly with the distractions of the flower-power era in the Bay Area.
"I was sort of studying sex, drugs and rock and roll in high school," says Steltzner. It wasn't just the long hair. "I liked to wear this strange Air Force jump suit. And my first car was a '69 Cadillac hearse. I put a bed in the back."
Talk about a night to remember. "Well, I was younger. It was a different time," says Steltzner.
After high school, the plan was to be a rock star. While he waited for stardom, Steltzner played bass guitar in Bay Area bands, watching his friends graduate and go off to college
But then something happened. As Steltzner tells it, he was on his way home from playing music at a club one night when he became fascinated with the stars, especially the constellation of Orion.
"The fact that it was in a different place in the sky at night when I returned home from playing a gig, than it had been when I'd driven out to the gig," he said. "And I had only some vague recollection from my high school time that something was moving with respect to something else, but that was it."
As crazy as it sounds, that experience was enough to motivate him to take a physics course at the local community college. That did it. He was hooked.
The fog of sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifted. He had to know all about the laws that govern the universe. The rocker wound up with a doctoral degree in engineering physics

.http://m.npr.org/news/front/157597270?page=0

 

[editor]

He has a formidable rock and roll quiff.

 

[Crispy]

Relative slant ranges?

Found it MRO passed almost directly overhead, so we should get a very clear picture. Not at such a dramatic angle as the Phoenix shot though.

Animation of the flyover:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1099

 

[teqniq]

 

[Crispy]

Found it MRO passed almost directly overhead, so we should get a very clear picture. Not at such a dramatic angle as the Phoenix shot though.

Animation of the flyover:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1099

The photo was taken at a distance of 340km. The HiRISE camera has a 1 microradian resolution, which means the maximum pixel dimension for the aeroshell alone could be as high as 13 pixels.

EDIT: Bad maths. Correct pixels now.

 

[editor]

Found it MRO passed almost directly overhead, so we should get a very clear picture. Not at such a dramatic angle as the Phoenix shot though.

Animation of the flyover:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1099

'Nuff maths going on there.

 

[Limejuice]

I am so CHUFF£ED!

Alas, I missed the real-time event, because I was taking the family up to the Olympic stadium this morning and had to get a 6.30 train.

We arrived about 8-ish and I was desperate to know if the landing worked. My 14-year-old son couldn't get a signal on the free, much-advertised wifi, and my old phone can only get web coverage in black and white.

So my 17-year-old daughter spotted a young couple sporting the American flag. "Ask them."

In a very non-British, non-reserved way I asked them if they knew whether the lander hand made it successfully down.

"Yes, man, it's there!" the male shouted. "It's landed, It's sending pictures!"

"That, my friend," I said, high-fiving the guy, "is beyond awesome. I would like to buy the American people a beer."

The female part of the couple spontaneously put her arms around me and kissed me on the lips. "That's how we celebrate," she told me.

"Whoa, dude!" exclaimed the American. "USA, go USA!"

"Er, excuse us," said Mrs Limejuice, dragging me away.

In the ensuing silence my son sidled up and said, "Dad, that was so worth it."

So, well done Americans everywhere. For your plucky, laser-eyed space cars, mad-cap rocket cranes and soft-lipped brunettes in London.

 

[weltweit]

Does anyone know what the environment is like on Mars?

 

[Firky]

Sorry if this has already been mentioned or posted but I have been following it elsewhere.

But I feel I need to say it: Why do NASA feel the need to update the Facebook page for Curiosity in the first person?

Intensely irritating.

"Here's a photograph from one of my rear facing cameras"

"Eye in the Sky: MRO's HiRISE camera caught this shot of me & my parachute during landing at Mars."

MY PARACHUTE AND I.

 

[dylans]

That is so fucking cool.

 

[Crispy]

Oh My Fucking God

 

[Firky]

Facebook seems to be the quickest to update BTW.

 

[weltweit]

Does anyone know what the environment is like on Mars?

scratch that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#Atmosphere

 

[T & P]

I still can't believe they pulled it off. Fucking kudos to NASA

Oh but to see real footage of the flying crane delivering Curiosity to the ground...

 

[sleaterkinney]

That pic of the parachute is great

"If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape," said Sarah Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "When you consider that we have been working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken, you begin to realize how challenging this picture was to obtain."

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/whatsnew/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=1290

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Heh the Apple blogs are frothing at the mouth due to the tech used for this being pretty much Apple based.

Any Mac fan watching the Mars Curiosity landing last night probably noticed the abundance of glowing Apple logos on the desks of NASA engineers and scientists. Exactly how all the Macs participated in managing Curiosity from millions of miles away is unknown, but the overwhelming presence of MacBook Pro’s should tell you they played an important enough roll to make any Apple fan proud.

 

[T & P]

Heh the Apple blogs are frothing at the mouth due to the tech used for this being pretty much Apple based.

Stand by for the rover to stop working in three months when it does not confirm it agrees to the latest T&C update.

 

[editor]

Here's a more balanced view of the mission's tech:

According to NASA, Curiosity is equipped with just 2GB of flash memory (the new MacBook Air offers up 64GB, 128GB, or 265GB). However, that 2GB is eight times as much as previous Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, had on board the space agency said.

Curiosity's computer chip also got a speed boost over its younger siblings. It clocks at up to 200 megahertz, 10 times the clock of the Spirit and Opportunity computers. There's also 256MB of RAM and 256KB of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory in Curiosity's calculating engine.

If those specs sound fairly pedestrian, consider that the aforementioned Macbook probably couldn't handle the radiation on Mars. Curiosity runs a BAE RAD 750 processor, a radiation-hardened version of the IBM PowerPC 750. According to BAE, the first RAD 750 processors were used in 2005 on Deep Impact, XSS-11, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter missions. They can function at temperatures between -55 degrees and 125 degrees Celsius; Mars temperatures can go as low as -153 and as high as 20 degrees, NASA said....

In a blog post, Dell said it had supported the "7 Minutes of Terror" Curiosity landing "with data analysis conducted in two NASA High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters running Dell PowerEdge servers."

The Dell HPC clusters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), dubbed Galaxy and Nebula, "provided vital support to NASA's Curiosity rover in analyzing the vast amounts of test data needed to correctly prepare the rover for entering the Martian atmosphere and landing it on the planet," Dell said. "The final landing sequence parameters developed by the mission team, which was tested and validated using the Dell HPC clusters, were uploaded last week to Curiosity."

Also in use during those tense seven minutes was the VxWorks operating system from California-based Wind River. "While on Mars, Curiosity will depend on VxWorks to perform mission-critical tasks, such as ground operations control, data collection, and Mars-to-Earth communication relay," Wind River said today.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2408127,00.asp

 

[dylans]

Another cool pic with Mt Sharp in the distance

 

[editor]

Looks fantastic.

 

[Crispy]

Here's the preliminary landing camera video



There will be a full hi-definition, full duration version later, as bandwidth allows.

 

[wayward bob]

http://twitter.com/marscuroisity

Curoisity Rover ‏@MarsCuroisity
"OH LOOK, ANOTHER LIGHT BROWN ROCK." - ME, EVERY FUCKING DAY FROM NOW UNTIL I FUCKING DIE.

 

[Badgers]

Gold medal for Curiousity in the 563 billion meters.

 

[dylans]

This color thumbnail image was obtained by NASA's Curiosity rover during its descent to the surface of Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The image was obtained by the Mars Descent Imager instrument known as MARDI and shows the 15-foot (4.5-meter) diameter heat shield when it was about 50 feet (16 meters) from the spacecraft. It was obtained two and one-half minutes before touching down on the surface of Mars and about three seconds after heat shield separation. It is among the first color images Curiosity sent back from Mars. The resolution of all of the MARDI frames is reduced by a factor of eight in order for them to be promptly received on Earth during this early phase of the mission. Full resolution (1,600 by 1,200 pixel) images will be returned to Earth over the next several months as Curiosity begins its scientific exploration of Mars.

 

[T & P]

^ Clearly a hologram.