Curiosity: Nasa Mars Landing

[asianobserve]

Seven Minutes of Terror

Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror

 

[Cliff@sea]

Curiosity Rover Landing on Mars :: Live Now !

One of the most daring space missions ever undertaken has successfully landed on Mars just Now .
Read more at the Live blog below or simply Tune in to your Telly !!

Curiosity rover Mars landing – live blog | Science | guardian.co.uk

6.32am: The sky crane is now lowering the rover.

6.32am: The probe is being monitored by Mars Odyssey. Now around 4km from the surface. The retrorockets are firing. Velocity is 50metres per second. Standing by for sky crane - the amazing system that lowers the rover by nylon ropes.

6.30am: Parachute deployed. The probe is decelerating.

6.28am: Early days, but all looking good. The spacecraft is "heading directly to the target", according to Nasa scientist. The seven minutes of terror are underway!

6.25am: One minute to entry. "We are now beginning to feel the atmosphere," says Nasa scientist.

Tweet from Brian Cox
Now admit it,this is more exciting than the 100m last night #MSL

6.24am: Geraint Jones, a planetary scientist from UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey, is here in the office with me. In answer to a question left on the blog earlier, he says:

@wwwwwlllll: The surface winds expected at the landing site are around 0-32 km/h. MSL is designed to cope with much stronger gusts than that if they arise. There was a dust storm spotted towards the end of last week around 1000km away, but this isn't causing the team any worries.

6.22am: The spacecraft is still accelerating under the planet's gravitational pull and will reach 13,000 mph before it starts to feel the outer atmosphere of the planet. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is about one hundredth that on Earth. Surface winds are typically up to 20 miles per hour, with gusts up to 90mph. The atmosphere is 95.3 per cent carbon dioxide, 2.7 percent nitrogen and 1.6 per cent argon. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is tracking the probe.

6.17am: The spacecraft has separated from its cruise stage. Small thrusters on the back shell of the probe have now fired to halt the two-revolutions-per-minute spin that the spacecraft maintains during flight. The thrusters fire next to bring the heat shield into position, in a move called "turn to entry".

A tweet from Curiosity:

I'm inside the orbit of Deimos and completely on my own. Wish me luck!

In case you were wondering, Deimos is the outer of Curiosity's two moons.

6.13am: If the rover lands safely, what will we see first from the surface?

This is from Curiosity's mission pages:

The very first images are likely to arrive more than two hours after landing, due to the timing of NASA's signal-relaying Odyssey orbiter.
They will be captured with the left and right Hazcams at the back and
front of the rover, and they will not yet be full-resolution (the two
images arriving on Earth first are "thumbnail" copies, which are 64 by
64 pixels in size). The Hazcams [Hazard-Avoidance cameras] are
equipped with very wide-angle, fisheye lenses, initially capped with
clear dust covers. The covers are designed to protect the cameras from
dust that may be kicked up during landing; they are clear just in case
they don't pop off as expected.

6.12am: More Mars trivia: The canyon system of Valles Marineris on Mars is the largest and deepest known in the solar system. It extends for more than 2,500 miles (4,000km) and in places reaches 10km from floor to the surrounding plateaus.

6.07am: It takes just under 14 minutes for radio signals to reach Earth from Mars. So when mission controllers hear that Curiosity has entered the atmosphere, it will already have been on the ground - safely or otherwise - for seven minutes. The gravity on Mars is 38% as strong as Earth's.

6.03am: Mars is around half the size of Earth, but the planet has a similar land mass. The target landing spot for Curiosity is the Gale Crater, which is thought to be around 3.5billion years old. The Curiosity rover will spend most of its Martian year exploring Mount Sharp, an enormous mound in the centre of the crater that rises 5km above the ground. The spacecraft is now 20 minutes from entry.

6.00am: Adam Stelzner, NASA's lead scientist for the Entry, Descent and Landing Phase has just given brief thanks to his team for getting Mars Science Laboratory so far so smoothly. He said:


Curiosity is in great shape...See you on the other side, on Mars.

5.57am: The spacecraft is now inside the orbit of the Martain moon, Phobos. During the entry, landing and descent phase, some 76 pyrotechnic charges will be fired aboard to probe to release weights and release the parachute. Shedding twin 75kg tungsten weights on arrival allows the spacecraft to get aerodynamic lift: instead of dropping like a stone, it can fly through the thin Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft has to sense its position and atmospheric conditions and use small onboard thrusters to steer its way to the landing site.

5.53am: The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is now within 10,000km (6,200 miles) of the planet. The probe accelerates as it arrives at Mars, then slows as it ploughs into the atmosphere. One of the first moves the spacecraft makes pulls the heat shield into a forwards position. Friction with the atmosphere will raise the temperature of the shield to more than 2000C.

5.45am: During the descent, the spacecraft must shed tungsten weights to shift its centre of gravity, fly through the Martian atmosphere, pop a huge parachute, fire retrorockets, and finally lower the car-sized rover to the ground. In these "seven minutes of terror", the spacecraft will go from 13,000mph to a standstill on the Martian surface. Touchdown is due at 6.31am BST.

05.44am: Good morning and welcome to our live blog of one of the most hair-raising landings ever attempted by Nasa: the Mars Science Laboratory mission and its intrepid Curiosity rover.

Rover Curiosity near Mars landing - CNN.com

 

[pmaitra]

Curiosity: Nasa Mars Landing

Undated handout CGI issued by NASA depicting the Curiosity rover, of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, as it uses its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to investigate the composition of a rock surface on Mars. Photo: PA

NASA Link: Mars Science Laboratory
Live Blog: Nasa Mars Landing: live blog - Telegraph

 

[pmaitra]

Re: Curiosity Rover Landing on Mars :: Live Now !

Looks like we both opened a thread at the same time.

Great men think alike.

 

[Cliff@sea]

Re: Curiosity Rover Landing on Mars :: Live Now !

Looks like we both opened a thread at the same time.

Great men think alike.

LOL. . . .

TUNE IN TO YOUR TELLY

Live images coming in now !!!!!!!!!

 

[pmaitra]

Live Stream: NASA - NASA TV

 

[asianobserve]

This thread should have been merged with this http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/americas/39811-seven-minutes-terror.html

Anyway, nice landing. NASA Rover Lands on Mars After Plummet | Science and Space | TIME.com

 

[Illusive]

Congrats to all scientists all over the world who participate in this project and NASA. I hope it finds comprehensive evidence of life on MARS.

 

[W.G.Ewald]

Mars rover's success pleases president but doesn't stop the cuts by Andrew Malcolm - Investors.com

 

[pmaitra]

Mars rover's success pleases president but doesn't stop the cuts by Andrew Malcolm - Investors.com

Curiosity project cost:

The project's cost will now be $2.5 billion.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/s...t-images-of-rover-on-mars.html?pagewanted=all

Compare this with:

The Fed began "Operation Twist'' in September 2011 with a pledge to swap $400 billion in securities. The extension announced in June will involve swapping bonds worth $267 billion more.

Source: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/q/quantitative_easing/index.html

 

[W.G.Ewald]

Imagine seeing such detail from 154 million miles away by Andrew Malcolm - Investors.com

-- the most fascinating photo so far is the one above, showing the relative landing spots for Curiosity and its jettisoned pieces.

Perhaps even more remarkable is the agencies' ability to use other assets to capture and send home photos of all this. Curiosity caught its own protective heat shield falling away in this shot. One satellite passing 211 miles overhead even caught Curiosity swinging below its immense supersonic parachute, about two minutes before landing.

There, in the upper middle, is where Curiosity's ground radar found a suitably level landing spot from those sites stored within its memory. The craft's heat shield, which attained 1,600 degrees on entry through the thinner Martian atmosphere, was jettisoned so Curiosity's radars could see the surface. The shield landed to the southeast.

The parachute, which was cut away, just before the rocket thrusters began to lower Curiosity the last 21 feet, ended up to the west. The rocket pack, after lowering the one-ton craft to the surface gently as programmed, then flew off to the northwest and crashed.

 

[pmaitra]

This thread should have been merged with this http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/americas/39811-seven-minutes-terror.html

Anyway, nice landing. NASA Rover Lands on Mars After Plummet | Science and Space | TIME.com

Thanks AsianObserve. Merged now. For quick action, please use the report button.

 

[W.G.Ewald]

Curiosity finds Mars 'teeming with UFOs' - Technology & science - Science - LiveScience - NBCNews.com

According to the fringe sector of the Internet, Mars is practically teeming with aliens.

Since NASA's Curiosity rover touched down on the Red Planet two weeks ago and powered up its cameras, it has already managed to photograph several alleged UFOs and other "anomalies" in the surrounding landscape.

From classic flying saucers to an absurdly out-of-place fossilized human finger, here's a rundown of what UFO believers claim to have found in Curiosity photos so far.

 

[W.G.Ewald]

[video]http://www.youtube.com/embed/XRCIzZHpFtY?rel=0[/video]