[boltondd]

I found out a bit more about the rover today. It has a laser ray-gun that can zap rocks with enough power to vaporise them.

Coooooool!! Enough for an Earth-shattering Kaboom?

[anenselog]

> I watched it live

So did I. So, in a different location, did my daughter at Uni. I bet this is the most-watched space event since Apollo.

[vforvandetta]

Kind of exciting- hope they find somethign of great interest.

[onelovemp]

I picked up The Boy from pre-school and we drove out to Tidbinbilla in the hope of catching the landing. Cars were parked either side of the access road for a couple of hundred metres back from the entrance to the centre. As we got there people were streaming out. We must have missed the landing signal by about 10 minutes at most. There were still at least a hundred people there plus some media.

I blame the son for missing the live signals, as he kept dithering about playing in the playground, going to the toilet and washing his hands. It's so hard to explain historic events to four year olds...

Anyway, he had fun there climbing into a spacesuit they have on display, asking me about the 1:1 scale Spirit/Opportunity rover model they have on display and watching kids trying to land Curiosity on the computer game (all unsuccessful that I saw).

After the other kids had left I had a go, and landed it successfully first time. *preen preen*

(At least I got to see Sojourner's first roll onto Mars back in 1997.)

[ireleda]

>
I found out a bit more about the rover today. It has a laser ray-gun that can zap rocks with enough power to vaporise them.

Cool

How much power does that use? How long does it take to replenish the power supply after use?

[Imihooniump]

> I watched it live

So did I. So, in a different location, did my daughter at Uni. I bet this is the most-watched space event since Apollo.

Grandkids 10 /12 were still talking about it over tea tonight, even though feed at school was patchy

[ZX3URrBH]

> "Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars!" a mission controller announced. The cheers were deafening.

I didn't cheer until I heard that they had telemetry from the surface. Then I cheered.

Rover health on the surface seems good so far as I can tell. It looks like a landing on flat terrain. Fore and aft cameras are both working and sending back images. The temperatures of the two RTGs seem to be OK.

I found out a bit more about the rover today. It has a laser ray-gun that can zap rocks with enough power to vaporise them.

I assume that is laser ablation spectroscopy?

[Brainpole]

I will always remember what I was doing when it landed.

Driving a ten ton road roller at 4.6kmh(top speed), down a public road while googling to find a live feed on a smartphone in the rain.

[Controller]

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fb...&type=1&ref=nf

hope this works !

[JoesBro]

And from Ed Yong ‏@edyong209 The NASA nmohawk guy becomes an instant internet celebrity, and @megangarber is ON IT ;-) http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/the-curiosity-landing-already-has-a-meme-nasas-mohawk-guy/260733/

[hellencomstar]

From KQEDscience ‏@KQEDscience The Best Of The Internet's Reaction To The Mars Rover Landing http://ow.ly/cMh8M @buzzfeed

and also,

From ♥s photography! ‏@Photojojo

Check out the camera's aboard the @marscuriosity rover.
They somehow look both antique + futuristic.
http://bit.ly/as4Olt

[ticfarentibia]

Image: Mars Curiosity rover caught in the act of landing by HiRISE
August 6, 2012


(Phys.org) -- An image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Curiosity rover still connected to its 51-foot-wide (almost 16 meter) parachute as it descended towards its landing site at Gale Crater.




"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."


The image was taken while MRO was 211 miles (340 kilometers) away from the parachuting rover. Curiosity and its rocket-propelled backpack, contained within the conical-shaped back shell, had yet to be deployed. At the time, Curiosity was about two miles (three kilometers) above the Martian surface.




"Guess you could consider us the closest thing to paparazzi on Mars," said Milkovich. "We definitely caught NASA's newest celebrity in the act."

Curiosity, NASA's latest contribution to the Martian landscape, landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5, PDT, (1:32 on Aug. 6, EDT) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall inside Gale Crater, 96 miles in diameter.

In other Curiosity news, one part of the rover team at the JPL continues to analyze the data from last night's landing while another continues to prepare the one-ton mobile laboratory for its future explorations of Gale Crater. One key assignment given to Curiosity for its first full day on Mars is to raise its high-gain antenna. Using this antenna will increase the data rate at which the rover can communicate directly with Earth. The mission will use relays to orbiters as the primary method for sending data home, because that method is much more energy-efficient for the rover.



Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks' elemental composition from a distance. Later in the mission, the rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.





To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance to layers of the crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.

More information: The image of Curiosity on its parachute can be found at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ms...pia15978b.html





http://phys.org/news/2012-08-image-m...er-caught.html

[StethyEntinic]

Curiosity’s Awesome Landing “Trailer”

Wanna watch the seven minutes of terror again??



http://www.universetoday.com/96646/c...nding-trailer/




http://www.universetoday.com/96630/w...ssion-control/



This short compilation video is a great overview of all the action on landing night for the Curiosity rover: Suspense, intrigue and definitely a happy ending. Only this “made for movie theater”-like trailer really happened.

[ricochettty]

Another giant leap for mankind [sorry Neil]

[MichaelfromSpace]

Now we have a colour photo of the surface of Mars from Curiosity. It's locally quite flat with only a few pebbles around. This was taken with the dust cover still on.

http://twitter.com/exploreplanets/st.../photo/1/large

[Flikemommoilt]

Mount Sharp from Curiosity.

[dhrishiasv]

Aha. It turns out that Curiosity did take pictures on the way down after all. The last two and half minutes of the "7 minutes of terror", from the time of heat shield separation, are concatenated into 40 seconds here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I

Here's the first frame from the video showing the heat shield just after separation


Detailed descriptions are here: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/wh...ws&NewsID=1291

"The MARDI camera is located on the chassis of the Curiosity rover. Just before the heat shield fell away, MARDI began its imaging task. The images selected for early downlink to Earth were taken at different points in Curiosity's final descent toward the surface. One of the earliest images shows the entry vehicle's heat shield 50 feet (15 meters) and falling away after separating from the vehicle three seconds before. A set of images demonstrates some of the gyrations Curiosity went through while on the parachute. Another remarkable set of images depicts the final moments leading up to landing, where the exhaust from four of the descent stage's 742 pounds of thrust rockets billow up dust from the Martian surface.

"Those MARDI images downlinked so far are low-resolution thumbnails, 192 by 144 pixels. In the months ahead, as communications between rover and Earth become more robust, full-frame images 1,600 by 1,200 pixels in size, are expected to provide the most complete and dramatic imagery of a planetary landing in the history of exploration.

"The mission also released a higher-resolution Hazcam image of their target, the mountain in the middle of Gale Crater informally titled Mount Sharp [see my post above]. The new image, taken by Curiosity's black-and-white Hazard Avoidance Cameras ..."

[styhorporry]

Thanks for that molly.

[DurryVony]

NASA shows first 'crime scene' photo of Mars landing
August 7, 2012 by Kerry Sheridan



About 36 hours after the US space agency's landed its $2.5 billion rover on Mars, NASA released Tuesday what it called a "crime scene" aerial shot of where the parachute, heat shield and rover came down.




The touchdown on August 6 of the Mars Science Laboratory involved the most elaborate attempt yet to drop a robotic vehicle on the surface of the Red Planet, and required a heat shield, supersonic parachute and rocket-powered sky crane.


The process, known as entry, descent and landing, or EDL, was referred to as "Seven Minutes of Terror" by NASA, but went off without a hitch, in what President Barack Obama called an "unprecedented feat of technology."



On approach, a heat shield protected the Curiosity rover's fiery entry into Mars' atmosphere, a parachute deployed to slow it down, and the spacecraft backshell separated.


Then, a rocket powered backpack was fired to power the one-ton rover downward before it was lowered by nylon tethers. The sky crane was designed to detach and fly away to crash somewhere to the north.


The latest black and white picture released Tuesday was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter about 300 kilometers (185 miles) overhead.


It shows the Mars Science Laboratory rover, nicknamed Curiosity, with the now defunct sky crane about 650 meters (yards) away to the northwest.

The parachute and backshell of the spacecraft that separated before it lowered down landed about 615 meters away from the rover to the southwest.

The heat shield appears to be about 1,200 meters from the rover to the southeast. "This is like a crime scene photo here," said Sarah Milkovich, a NASA scientist who is the lead investigator of the HiRISE camera on the Mars orbiter.




"Hopefully in our future images we be able to get even better, more detail," she said, adding that the dark areas in the photo show where dust was kicked up during the landing.

The EDL team has reviewed the latest photos and said "the layout looks kind of the way they expected," according to mission manager Mike Watkins.

The pieces will likely stay on Mars. There are no plans to recover them to bring back to Earth.


NASA is continuing to run tests on the various instruments on board the rover, which aim to help hunt for signs that life may once have existed on Earth's neighbor planet, once believed to be a wetter place than it is today.


So far most of the checks have gone well and the rover appears to be in good shape.

On Wednesday, NASA plans to lift the rover's remote sensing mast for the first time. More images, including color high-resolution shots, are expected to arrive in the coming days.


But the rover is not expected to start moving for several more weeks, and it may be a year before it reaches its scientific target of Mount Sharp.


Deputy project scientist Joy Crisp said the latest analysis shows that the rover is 6.5 kilometers from the base of the mountain, if it were to travel straight there.


However, scientists have warned it is difficult to estimate the exact start of the base and they have no plans to drive to it directly, but will likely take a more meandering route.

The Mars Science Laboratory is a nuclear-powered vehicle that is designed for a two-year robotic mission on Mars, though scientists hope it will last as least twice its original design life.




http://phys.org/news/2012-08-nasa-cr...hoto-mars.html

[P1international]

The pieces will likely stay on Mars. There are no plans to recover them to bring back to Earth.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Hmmmmm...I'm not so sure of that...time will tell. [as it always does]