• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Mars Exploration 1: Unmanned Missions (Probes; Rovers; etc.)

Some really stunning imagery:

Rover's image from Mars hill peak

The US space agency's robotic rover Spirit has sent back a partial panoramic view from the summit of "Husband Hill" at Gusev Crater on Mars.

Spirit was still sending down data that makes up the colour 360-degree picture when Nasa held a news conference.

The robot reached the hill's summit at the end of August following a 14-month climb, driving in reverse and forward modes to reduce wear on its wheels.

Spirit has been exploring Gusev Crater on the Red Planet since January 2004.

We have taken a beautiful 360-degree panoramic image, which I truly believe will be one of the signature accomplishments of this mission
Steve Squyres, Mars rover team lead scientist
Click to expand...

Spirit landed in an area called Gusev Crater, which scientists had supposed to have once held a lake. After investigating the area around its landing site, the rover was dispatched to explore a region known as the Columbia Hills, named in honour of the seven astronauts who died aboard the space shuttle in 2003.

Husband Hill, named after Columbia's commander Rick Husband, is one of the peaks in the range.

"We have taken a beautiful 360-degree panoramic image, which I truly believe will be one of the signature accomplishments of this mission," said Professor Steve Squyres, of Cornell University, lead scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover mission.

View from the top

The picture released on Thursday represents 240 degrees of Spirit's view from the summit.

The scientists will now use the picture to map out targets in the landscape worthy of further investigation.

"What field geologists typically do - and Spirit is a robotic field geologist - is you climb to the top of the nearest hill and take a look around so you get the lay of the land and figure out where you want to go," Professor Squyres told the news conference in Washington.

Mission scientists have been planning to head for terrain to the south after their sojourn at Husband Hill.

They know from images taken in orbit that there is interesting geology there. But they were not detailed enough to plan a route, something the new picture will help the rover team do.

Promised land

One section of rugged terrain to the south of Spirit's position has been described by a team member as "the geologic promised land".

The picture also shows an intriguing circular feature dubbed "Home Plate" and two other peaks in the Columbia Hills range; Ramon Hill and McCool Hill, named after Columbia crew members Ilan Ramon and William McCool. Squyres said Spirit could spend its next Martian winter at McCool Hill, should it be so fortunate still to be working.

Meanwhile, Spirit's "twin" rover Opportunity is continuing to explore the dark red dunes of Meridiani Planum on the other side of the planet.

Opportunity has spent several Martian days, or sols, analysing a feature called "lemon rind", a thin surface layer covering portions of rock poking through the soil north of an impact crater called Erebus.

Nasa said images of the lemon rind appeared slightly different in colour from surrounding rocks. It also appears to be slightly more resistant to wind erosion than the outcrop's interior, the agency added.

-----------
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/s ... 206348.stm

Published: 2005/09/02 12:29:24 GMT

© BBC MMV
Click to expand...

Piccies on the BBC site but just look at this beauty:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/ ... R1_br2.jpg

Stunning. Sent chills down my spine.
 
Cool pic.

Just left of the middle there appears to be what looks like breeze blocks half covered by the dusty surface, jutting out! Interglactic builders dont clean their mess up either! :shock:
 
Beagle 2 probe 'spotted' on Mars
By Pallab Ghosh
BBC science correspondent

The scientist behind the British Beagle 2 mission to the Red Planet says the craft may have been found in pictures of the Martian surface.

Colin Pillinger says the images suggest the mission very nearly worked, but Beagle somehow failed to contact Earth.

He thinks the craft may have hit the ground too hard - as the atmosphere was thinner than usual because of dust storms in that region of Mars.

This may have damaged onboard instruments, preventing the call home.

The Beagle 2 lead scientist has been painstakingly studying images of the landing site in search of his spacecraft ever since it was lost on Christmas Day two years ago.

Now, he says, specially processed pictures from the camera on the US space agency's (Nasa) Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft show that it came down in a crater close to the planned landing site.

Life search

The robotic laboratory was designed to search Mars for signs of past or present life. The last contact was an image of Beagle taken by its mothership, the Mars Express orbiter, on 19 December 2003.

The £45m lander was scheduled to put down in a near-equatorial region of the planet known as Isidis Planitia. But despite many attempts to locate it - using overflying spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes - no sign of it, not even any wreckage, has been detected.

Professor Pillinger accepts the sceptics will say Beagle 2 is too small to be seen from space.

And when taken in isolation, each of the "objects" in the crater bowl could be explained by other phenomena. But, he argues, it is unlikely to be mere coincidence that so many unusual features are to be found "within 20m of each other".

"We've had the pessimists round saying 'we've already seen something like that'. But they haven't seen them all together," he told the BBC.

Crater bounce

Based on the features found in the crater, members of the Beagle 2 team have reconstructed what might have happened to Beagle as it touched down on the Red Planet.

"There is a lot of disturbance in this crater, particularly a big patch on the north crater wall which we think is the primary impact site," Professor Pillinger explains.

"There are then other features around the crater consistent with the airbags bouncing around and finally falling down into the middle. Then, when you cut the lace, the airbags fall apart giving three very symmetrical triangles."

Four roughly circular features to the right of the 'airbags' could conceivably be Beagle's unfolded solar panels.

Professor Pillinger claims the images show Beagle 2 came very close to being the first spacecraft to mount a concerted search for life on the Martian surface.

And so, he says, it would have been common sense for British and European governments to have backed another attempt.

Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, which will photograph Mars in unprecedented detail once it reaches the planet next year, could confirm the tentative identification.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4542174.stm
Click to expand...
 
Mar. 10 -- Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrives at Mars

Fast-Talking NASA Spacecraft Starts Final Approach to Mars
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has begun its final approach to the red planet after activating a sequence of commands designed to get the spacecraft successfully into orbit. The spacecraft arrives at Mars on March 10. (Mar. 8)
+ View release + Mission home page
+ Mission media room + Audio clips: Mar. 8 briefing
+ Profile: First Trip to Mars + Videos and podcast

go here >> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/


NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is scheduled to reach Mars on Friday, March 10, when it carries out the complex maneuvers that will put it into orbit. NASA TV and the Web will cover the two-hour orbit insertion process. Once safely in its final orbit later this year, the spacecraft will see features on Mars in greater detail than ever before.
 
Robotic NASA Craft Begins Orbiting Mars for Most-Detailed Ex

With a crucially timed firing of its main engines today, NASA's new mission to Mars successfully put itself into orbit around the red planet.

The spacecraft, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will provide more science data than all previous Mars missions combined.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2006-034
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6144092.stm

Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has been out of contact with Earth for more than a week.
Engineers have been trying to re-establish communication with the probe, which could be showing its age after 10 years in space.

The spacecraft has entered "safe mode", awaiting further instructions from controllers on Earth.

Since then, the spacecraft has not confirmed receiving a command to point one of its transmitters to Earth.

MGS was launched in November 1996, operating longer than any Martian craft.

Carrying a powerful camera that has returned thousands of images, it has discovered features suggesting water once flowed on the desert world, and it has scoped out potential landing sites for future exploration.

Mars mapping

The spacecraft, designed to systematically map Mars, is one of four spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet. Its companions include Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency's Mars Express.

A motor component controlling one of Surveyor's two solar arrays apparently malfunctioned last week. The spacecraft may have gone into a power-saving safe mode by turning so that the array faced the Sun.

Thomas Thorpe, MGS project manager, said that might have brought the craft's antennas and transmitters out of alignment with Earth.

Without telemetry, controllers do not know the angle the panel failed at or the orientation of the main body of the spacecraft.

Another difficulty is that the spacecraft changes position quickly, zooming around Mars twice every two hours. Signals cannot reach it when it is in eclipse for 40 minutes of that orbit time.

"You have to know which receiver to command to, you have to address (precisely) where the commands are going," Mr Thorpe said.

Power problem

If it has not been receiving commands, the spacecraft is programmed to eventually change its position automatically so that one of its low-gain antennas is pointing at Earth.

However, this may mean putting one solar panel in the dark, leaving just one to power the probe's systems.

"One panel is not sufficient to keep the spacecraft alive for very long," Mr Thorpe said.

In order to get a better idea of Surveyor's position, controllers had asked to have it photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which began circling the Red Planet on 10 March, Mr Thorpe said.

"It's not clear how long it will take us to exhaust possibilities or come to a conclusion that we're not going to hear from it," Thorpe said. "If it's getting sufficient power, the spacecraft could stay healthy for years," the MGS project manager added.

Mars Global Surveyor was originally launched as a $247m mission to study the planet's surface for one Martian year, roughly two Earth years.
Click to expand...

The fact that it's told to rotate to face the earth with it's antenna, whether it cuts out the power or not givess a good reason why it might have lost contact...
 
NASA Robotic Rocket Plane To Survey Martian Surface
http://www.popsci.com/technology/articl ... an-surface
By Stuart Fox Posted 11.24.2009 at 1:29 pm 16 Comments


NASA's Martian Rocket Plane courtesy of NASA
Since budget cuts and the inability to overcome problems like boredom and high radiation doses have ruled out any manned mission to Mars in the foreseeable future, NASA has shifted gears back towards a program of robotic exploration. To that end, NASA now wants a rocket-powered UAV to fly around the Red Planet, photographing the surface.

The plane, repetitively named ARES (not to be confused with NASA's shuttle replacement, also named ARES), would fly to Mars in a regular rocket. Once it reaches the fourth rock from the Sun, it would pop out of the capsule, deploy its wings, and fire the rockets for an hour-long flight through the Martian sky. During that flight, ARES would cover about 373 miles, which is a little less than 100 times the area covered by the Spirit rover over the last five years.

Any aircraft flying on Mars would need some serious horsepower. The Martian atmosphere is 169 times thinner than the air here on Earth, so generating lift over ARES's wings may prove tricky. NASA has already devoted five years to initial design, but still has a long, long way to go before this thing takes flight. Of course, when the end product is a Martian rocket plane, the wait is worth it.
Click to expand...
 
Grrr! They still can't tell the difference between a monkey and an Ape.

Former Soviet 'Monkey Nursery' Now Wants To Send An Ape To Mars
http://www.popsci.com/technology/articl ... d-ape-mars
By Clay Dillow
Posted 12.21.2009 at 12:32 pm 0 Comments


Space Monkeys Ham the Space Chimp was the first hominid in space. Now Russia is toying with the idea of sending the first monkey to Mars. NASA
Some rivalries die hard. Ham the American chimpanzee stirred up some Cold War ire when he became the first hominid in space in early 1961; now, scientists at the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, the pride of early Soviet space science, want to send one of their 350 apes on a mission to Mars -- with a robot overseer, naturally.

The institute resides in Sukhumi in the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia (remember that brief military tangle last year when Russia rolled through its former Soviet satellite?), where it once churned out medical research, as well as two rhesus monkeys that traveled into space in 1987. When the Soviet Union collapsed so did the institute's benefactor, but a renewed relationship with Russia since seceding from Georgia has rekindled Abkhaz-Russian relations, as well as the prospect for sending one of the institute's many surviving apes into space.

Russia's Cosmonautics Academy is in preliminary talks with the institute regarding a simulated space flight to Mars that would lay the foundation for a future mission. As such, the institute may become home to a biosphere-like containment facility like the recent Mars-500 project that confined six humans in space-simulating conditions for 120 days. A round-trip journey to Mars is estimated to take about 520 days, so a Mars-bound space ape would have to withstand confinement for very lengthy periods of time.

That's where the story takes a real twist: to help the monkey maintain itself during such a long journey, scientists are considering sending a helper robot along on the mission to feed and clean up after the ape. The monkey, of course, would have to be carefully trained to interact with the robot. Yerosha, one of the rhesus monkeys the institute sent into space in 1987, managed to free a paw and run amok during Russia's last 13-day space-ape adventure, so there's no telling what sort of calamities might befall a bored Russian ape on a year-and-a-half mission to the Red Planet. Even if the mission never materializes, there's probably a Pixar script somewhere in that premise.
Click to expand...
 
For that matter, apes aren't hominids if I understand the definition correctly. Hominids should include only those primate species whose normal mode of locomotion is bipedal (i.e., homo and australopithecine; maybe a couple of other extinct lineages I'm blanking on).
 
Yerosha, one of the rhesus monkeys the institute sent into space in 1987, managed to free a paw and run amok during Russia's last 13-day space-ape adventure, so there's no telling what sort of calamities might befall a bored Russian ape on a year-and-a-half mission to the Red Planet.
Click to expand...
That's an interesting way of putting it. As I recall, it got one hand free, and did the sort of thing a bored monkey can do with one hand. Or a bored human, for that matter, only not with other people in the room, typically. (Monkeys aren't so constrained.)
 
PeniG said:
For that matter, apes aren't hominids if I understand the definition correctly. Hominids should include only those primate species whose normal mode of locomotion is bipedal (i.e., homo and australopithecine; maybe a couple of other extinct lineages I'm blanking on).
Click to expand...
It appears they've changed it.
Apes are hominids now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominid
# A hominid is any member of the biological family Hominidae (the "great apes"), including the extinct and extant humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.
# A hominoid or ape is a member of the superfamily Hominoidea: extant members are the lesser apes (gibbons) and great apes.
# A hominine is a member of the subfamily Homininae: gorillas, chimpanzees, humans (excludes orangutans).
# A hominin is a member of the tribe Hominini: chimpanzees and humans.
# A hominan is a member of the sub-tribe Hominina: modern humans and their extinct relatives.

Confused? I am.
 
Hmm...I suppose there must be somebody whose job it is to make new names and recategorize things periodically, and it got to be our turn. You can't ask people not to do their jobs, unless they work at call centers, but it's inconvenient.

I don't like being a hominin, which ought to be one thing and sound like something else, or possibly be ground up into grits (though my dad ate them fried, and a cholesterol feast it was, too); and being a hominan just sounds silly. I expect I'll adjust.
 
Nasa's Curiosity rover targets smaller landing zone
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

The US space agency (Nasa) says it has narrowed the expected landing zone for its Mars rover, Curiosity.
The 900kg robot is heading for a touchdown on 6 August (GMT) in a near-equatorial depression on the Red Planet known as Gale Crater.
Controllers have drawn an ellipse on the surface that is just 7km by 20km.
They say they can hit this target because of their confidence in the high-precision landing system attached to the rover.

This system will use thrusters to guide the high-velocity phase of the robot's entry into the Martian atmosphere - a technology not available on previous lander missions. A large parachute and a rocket-powered cradle will manage the final moments of the descent.

Nasa says that by tightening the extent of the ellipse, down from the previously envisaged 20km by 25km, it can cut the time taken by the rover to roll to its primary science location.
This is the base of a 5km-tall mountain in the middle of Gale Crater known as Mount Sharp.

Scientists expect Curiosity to find layered rock deposits at this site.
These sediments should provide new insights on past environmental conditions on the Red Planet - conditions that may have supported microbial life many billions of years ago.

"We have reduced the amount of time it takes to traverse to that point by several months - perhaps as many as four," explained Pete Theisinger, the rover project manager at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"And that allows a greater duration of prime mission at those key science targets and the accomplishment of science objectives."

The encapsulated Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), was launched in November last year.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18401248

Page includes a very good video simulation of the landing proceedure - watch it full-screen! 8)
(Video nearly 5 min long.)
 
Vid at link.

Destination Mars: A Timeline of Red Planet Landings
http://www.space.com/16496-mars-landing ... eline.html
by SPACE.com StaffDate: 09 July 2012 Time: 02:44 PM ET

Sky Crane in aerial ballet mode during the descent of NASA’s Curiosity rover to the Martian surface.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's newest Mars rover — a car-size robot that will scour the Martian surface for signs that the planet could have supported life — will make a thrilling and unprecedented landing on the Red Planet next month.

The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity rover, is scheduled to touch down on Mars on the night of Aug. 5. The rover's entry, descent and landing from the top of the Martian atmosphere have been nicknamed the "seven minutes of terror."

Since the 1-ton rover is too big for airbags to cushion its landing, Curiosity is equipped with a rocket-powered sky crane to lower it to the surface. Once Curiosity touches down, cables will release the sky crane, which will fly off and crash-land a safe distance away from the rover.

But while Curiosity's nerve-wracking landing is unprecedented, the sophisticated rover is not the first robotic spacecraft to set foot on the Red Planet. [Mars Explored: Landers and Rovers Since 1971 (Infographic)]

Here's a look at all the previous missions that have attempted to land on Mars (mission failures marked in bold, successes are underlined):

Mars 2: (FAILED) USSR, launched May 19, 1971. The Mars orbiter and lander arrived on Nov. 2, 1971, but returned no useful data, and the lander burned up due to steep entry.

Mars 3: (FAILED) USSR, launched May 28, 1971. The Mars orbiter and lander arrived on Dec. 3, 1971. The lander operated on the surface of Mars for 20 seconds before failing.

Mars 6: (FAILED) USSR, launched Aug. 5, 1973. The Mars flyby module and lander arrived on March 3, 1974 but the lander failed due to a fast impact.

Mars 7: (FAILED) USSR, launched Aug. 9, 1973. The Mars flyby module and lander arrived on March 3, 1974 but the lander missed the planet.

Viking 1: U.S., launched Aug. 20, 1975. The Mars orbiter operated from June 1976 to 1980 and the lander operated from July 1976 to 1982.

Viking 2: U.S., launched Sept. 9, 1975. The Mars orbiter operated from Aug. 1976 to 1987, and the lander operated from Sept. 3, 1976 to 1980. Combined, the Viking orbiters and landers returned more than 50,000 photos.


Phobos 1: (FAILED) USSR, launched July 7, 1988. The Mars orbiter and Phobos lander were lost in Aug. 1988 en route to Mars. [Mars: The Spacecraft Graveyard]

Phobos 2: (FAILED) USSR, launched July 12, 1988. The Mars orbiter and Phobos lander were lost in March 1989 near Phobos.

Mars 96: (FAILED) Russia, launched Nov. 16, 1996. The orbiter, two landers and two penetrators were lost after the rocket failed.

Mars Pathfinder: U.S., launched Dec. 4, 1996. The Mars lander and rover landed on July 4, 1997 and communicated with ground teams last on Sept. 27, 1997.

Mars Polar Lander/Deep Space 2: (FAILED) U.S., launched Jan. 3, 1999. The lander and two penetrators were lost on arrival in December 1999.

Beagle 2: (FAILED) European Space Agency, launched June 2, 2003. Beagle 2 launched on ESA's Mars Express orbiter, which complet­ed its prime mission in November 2005 and is currently on an extended mission. The Beagle 2 lander. however, was lost on arrival on Dec. 25, 2003.

Mars Exploration Rover Spirit: U.S., launched June 10, 2003. The Mars rover landed on the Red Planet on Jan. 4, 2004 for three-month mission to look for signs of past water activity on Mars. Ground controllers lost communication with Spirit in March 2010, and repeated attempts to awaken the rover failed. The rover far outlived its intended warranty, and is considered a success. NASA declared Spirit dead in May 2011.

Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity: U.S., launched July 7, 2003. The Mars rover landed on Jan. 25, 2004 for a three-month prime mission in the Meridiani Planum region. The rover has currently logged more than 20 miles on the Red Planet and is now investigating the huge Endeavour crater.

Phoenix Mars Lander: U.S., launched Aug. 4, 2007. The Mars lander touched down on May 25, 2008 and dug through Martian soil to confirm the presence of water ice beneath the surface. Phoenix's solar panels suffered severe damage from the harsh Martian winter, and communication with the $475 million lander was lost in November 2008. After repeated attempts to reestablish contact, NASA declared Phoenix broken and dead in May 2010.

Phobos-Grunt: (FAILED) Russia, launched Nov. 8, 2011 on a mission to return samples from the Mars moon Phobos. The $163 million robotic probe suffered a crippling malfunction shortly after launch, stranding it in Earth orbit. Mission managers said Phobos-Grunt spacecraft's thrusters failed to fire in a maneuver that would have sent the spacecraft on to Mars. The spacecraft plummeted back to Earth and was destroyed on Jan. 15, 2012.

Mars Science Laboratory: (NOT YET ARRIVED) U.S., launched Nov. 26, 2011. The Mars rover will investigate whether the planet was ever hospitable to life. The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover will land at Gale crater on the night of Aug. 5, 2012, and will investigate the mountain at its center with exposed rock faces that represent various periods in Mars' geologic history.
Click to expand...
 
Very high failure rate for Mars landers. A bad omen for a manned landing?
 
Mythopoeika said:
Very high failure rate for Mars landers. A bad omen for a manned landing?
Click to expand...

The Martians have very good air-defence systems.
 
Mission to Mars: A Horizon Special
BBC2 tonight from 9:00pm to 10:00pm

2012-2013, Episode 2

Series exploring topical scientific issues. The programme goes behind the scenes at NASA, as the countdown commences to the landing of a billion-dollar nuclear-powered rover on the surface of Mars. In the past, many missions to Mars have ended in failure, so can the costly and audacious Curiosity mission succeed where others have failed and answer the question of whether there is life on Mars?
 
Curiosity has landed; rover functioning. The NASA control room is going mad.
 
Nasa's Curiosity rover successfully lands on Mars
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News, Pasadena

The US space agency has just landed a huge new robot rover on Mars.
The one-tonne vehicle, known as Curiosity, touched down in a deep crater near the planet's equator after a plunging through the atmosphere.
It is going to look for evidence that Mars could once have supported life.

A signal confirming the rover was on the ground safely was relayed to Earth via Nasa's Odyssey satellite, which is in orbit around the Red Planet.
The success was greeted with a roar of approval here at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The mission has even already sent its first low-resolution images - showing the rover's wheel and its shadow, through a dust-covered lens cap that has yet to be removed.
A first colour image of Curiosity's surroundings should be returned in the next couple of days.

Engineers and scientists who have worked on this project for the best part of 10 years punched the air and hugged each other.
The descent through the atmosphere after a 570-million-km journey from Earth had been billed as the "seven minutes of terror" - the time it would take to complete a series of high-risk manoeuvres that would slow the rover from an entry speed of 20,000km/h to just 1m/s to allow its wheels to set down softly.

The mission team will now spend the next few hours assessing the health of the vehicle (also referred to as the Mars Science Laboratory, MSL).
This is the fourth rover Nasa has put on Mars, but its scale and sophistication dwarf all previous projects.
Its biggest instrument alone is nearly four times the mass of the very first robot rover deployed on the planet back in 1997.

Curiosity has been sent to investigate the central mountain inside Gale Crater that is more than 5km high.
It will climb the rise, and, as it does so, study rocks that were laid down billions of years ago in the presence of liquid water.
The vehicle will be looking for evidence that past environments could have favoured microbial life.

Scientists warn, however, that this will be a slow mission - Curiosity is in no hurry.
For one thing, the rover has a plutonium battery that should give it far greater longevity than the solar-panelled power systems fitted to previous vehicles.

"People have got to realise this mission will be different," commented Steve Squyres, the lead scientist of the Opportunity and Spirit rovers landed in 2004.
"When we landed we only thought we'd get 30 sols (Martian days) on the surface, so we had to hit the ground running. Curiosity has plenty of time," he told the BBC.

Initially, the rover is funded for two years of operations. But many expect this mission to roll and roll for perhaps a decade or more.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19144464

8)
 
Congratulations to the whole team that worked on this incredible achievement.
Fingers crossed that everything is in good working order and it performs all its tasks faultlessly.
 
This landing is a real triumph of modern engineering.
Fantastic!
 
Rover shoots movie during descent
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News, Pasadena

Images that the Curiosity rover took of the surface of Mars as it made its historic descent on Monday (GMT) have now been released.
Nasa has provided almost 300 thumbnails from a sequence of pictures that will eventually be run together as a colour hi-def movie.

Visible in the timelapse is the heatshield discarded by the vehicle as it neared the ground.
So too is the dust kicked up by the rover's rocket-powered crane.
It was the crane that finally settled the robot on to the surface.
A signal confirming the Curiosity rover had landed on Mars was received here at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 05:32 GMT; 06:32 BST on Monday (22:32 PDT Sunday).

The vehicle - also known as the Mars Science laboratory (MSL) - put down in a deep equatorial depression known as Gale Crater.

Pictures from the Mars Descent Imager (Mardi), even in their thumbnail form, have now allowed engineers to work out Curiosity's precise position on the planet - a latitude of -4.5895 and a longitude of 137.4417.
The full set of high-resolution pictures from Mardi will take some weeks to downlink.

The mission team has also got its best view yet of Mount Sharp, the 5.5km-high peak sitting in the middle of Gale.
This comes from a hazard avoidance camera mounted on the lower-front of the vehicle.
Ordinarily, hazcam pictures are very wide-angle in view and therefore distorted, but image processing software has been used to correct the geometry.
The mountain is the ultimate destination for this $2.5bn (£1.6bn) mission.

Satellite data has indicated that sediments at the base of Mount Sharp were laid down in the presence of abundant water.
Curiosity, with its sophisticated suite of 10 instruments, will study those rocks to try to determine if ancient environments on Mars were ever favourable for life.

Released earlier on Monday was a spectacular shot acquired not by the rover but of the rover. This came from one of the US space agency's satellites at the Red Planet - the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
MRO played a key role in Monday's landing by recording telemetry from the robot as it approached the ground.
But Nasa also tasked it with trying to get a picture of the new arrival. The rover is seen when still inside its protective shell.

Moments after this image was acquired, the vehicle would have dropped out of the capsule to ride its rocket-powered crane to the base of the crater. The resolution in the picture is such that it is even possible to pick out the discarded heatshield.

The mission team is now in its first full day of Martian operations (Sol 1). One of the key activities will be to deploy Curiosity's high-gain antenna. This unit will allow the vehicle to talk direct to Earth, in addition to relaying data via satellites like MRO.

Another action planned for Sol 1 will be to get a colour shot from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (Mahli).
This camera is mounted on the rover's tool-bearing turret at the end of its robotic arm. The picture, which should be released on Tuesday, will provide the most detailed view of the rover's surroundings to date.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19159382

Link for thumbnail movie:http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?collection_id=14661&media_id=149974611

Even Full screen, this is not spectacular - I'm waiting for the Imax version! ;)
 
Nasa's Curiosity rover pictured on Mars by MRO satellite
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News, Pasadena

Nasa has used one of its satellites to image the Curiosity rover on Mars.
The picture shows not only the six-wheeled vehicle, but also all the components of its discarded landing system.
These items include the heatshield, the parachute and backshell of the entry capsule, and the skycrane that lowered the rover to the surface.

The image was acquired by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from 300km and at an oblique angle of 41 degrees.
"Even though these weren't the best viewing conditions, you can still see a lot of detail," said MRO and Curiosity scientist Sarah Milkovich.
"You can see a lot of dark regions around the different components where when they came in, they disturbed the bright dust and exposed a darker surface underneath," she told BBC News.
This is most evident at the crash site of the skycrane, which clearly kicked up a shower of dusty debris on impact that then fanned off to the northwest.

And by the rover itself, it is possible on the close-up view to see two darker lobes either side of the vehicle. These are the patches of ground that were disturbed by the rockets of the skycrane at the moment of touchdown.

To give a sense of scale, the distance from the rover to the heatshield is 1,200m; to the parachute and backshell, 615m; and to the skycrane, 650m.

MRO will get another picture of the landing site in five days' time but on that occasion it will be looking almost straight down instead of off to the side. In this image, the team hope to get much better definition on the vehicle.
The main camera on the satellite - its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise) - can achieve a resolution of 30cm/pixel, so it may even be possible to see the shadows the robot casts on the ground.

The geologists on the mission team have taken a keen interest in the landing site image for what it tells them about the nature of the rocks in the area.
It is apparent from the picture that there are three distinct zones of ground.

At top-right is an area that previous observations have revealed to have high thermal inertia - it stays warmer longer at night, for example - than the broad area off to the left that holds all of the landing components other than the heatshield.
The third zone at bottom-right seems to display more impact cratering, which is usually indicative of being an older surface.

Visiting the intersection of all three zones is now being considered as a possible science destination once the rover starts some serious driving in September.

A signal confirming the Curiosity rover (also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, MSL) had landed on the Red Planet was received here at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 05:32 GMT; 06:32 BST on Monday (22:32 PDT Sunday).
The robot rover put down on the floor of a deep depression on Mars' equator known as Gale Crater.

The first hours on the surface have been spent checking out the health of the vehicle and retrieving some early engineering pictures that tell the mission team about the immediate vicinity where Curiosity landed.

Efforts are currently under way to deploy the vehicle's high-gain antenna (HGA), which would provide a direct-to-Earth link through which to pass data. At the moment, it is all being relayed back via MRO and Nasa's other Mars satellite, Odyssey.

The HGA task should have been completed on Sol 1 - the first full day of Martian surface operations - but the team is having to deal with a pointing error on the antenna. This should be fixed on Sol 2.

Also on Sol 2, a command will be sent to lift the rover's mast, which holds its navigation cameras and the ChemCam laser instrument that can determine the chemistry of rocks from a distance.

Perhaps one of the best pictures returned from the rover so far is the test shot from Mahli - the Mars Hand Lens Imager.
This camera is mounted on the rover's tool-bearing turret at the end of its robotic arm.
The picture, which was released early on Tuesday, gives us a real sense of being on Mars.
You can see some rocks in the near-field and the rim of Gale crater in the far-field.

It looks hazy simply because the transparent dust cover was left in place when the shot was taken, but the camera team says the image tells them the Mahli is in great shape.
"If it did not have dust on it, you would not know it had dust on it," explained Ken Edgett, the camera's principal investigator.

"The purpose of the first picture? We haven't used the camera and its focus mechanism since July last year [before we launched from Earth]. It was to check the instrument was working properly - and it is," he told BBC News.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19172564
 
Nasa's Curiosity rover lifts its navigation cameras
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News, Pasadena

The Curiosity Mars rover has lifted its mast and used its high navigation cameras for the first time.
The robot vehicle has returned black and white images that capture part of its own body, its shadow on the ground and views off to the horizon.
Spectacular relief - the rim cliffs of the crater in which the rover landed - can be seen in the distance.

Curiosity - also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, MSL - put down on the Red Planet on Monday (GMT).
The US space agency (Nasa) mission came to rest on the floor of a deep depression on Mars' equator known as Gale Crater, close to a 5.5km-high mountain.
The plan eventually is to take the robot to the base of this mountain where it is expected to find rocks that were laid down billions of years ago in the presence of liquid water.
Curiosity will probe these sediments for evidence that past environments on Mars could once have favoured microbial life.

Since its landing, engineers have been running through a list of health checks and equipment tests.
These have included deploying a high-gain antenna to provide a data link to Earth additional to the UHF satellite relays it uses most of the time. This antenna failed to point correctly at first, but the problem has now been fixed.

The mast was stowed for the journey to Mars, lying flat on the deck of the rover.
Raising it into the vertical was the main task of Sol 2 - the second full Martian day of surface operations.
Locked in the upright position, the masthead and its cameras stand some 2m above the ground.

Curiosity has two pairs of black and white, greyscale, navigation cameras which can acquire stereo imagery to help the rover pick a path across the surface.
These Navcams sit just to the side of two science cameras - one wideangle, one telephoto. It is these Mastcams that will provide the really exquisite, true colour views of the Martian landscape. We should see something of their output following Sol 3.

But the Navcam images are already providing a great deal of information.
"You can see in the near-field the scour marks the descent engines made on the surface," noted Justin Maki, a curiosity imaging scientist.

"Go all the way out to the horizon and you can see the north rim of Gale Crater . This image is fantastic, especially for all of us who've developed these cameras, and based on what we've done in the last 12 hours we've declared the Navcams commissioned and ready for use."

The thruster marks in the ground have certainly piqued the interest of Curiosity project scientist, John Grotzinger.
"What's cool about this is that we got some free trenching," he said.
"We see our first glimpse of bedrock. Apparently there is a harder rockier material beneath this veneer of gravel and pebbles. So we're already getting a look into the subsurface."

He also remarked how Earth-like the vista appeared, joking: "You would really be forgiven for thinking that Nasa was trying to pull a fast one, and we actually put a rover out in the Mojave Desert and took a picture - a little Los Angeles smog coming in there". 8)

Most of the pictures we have seen so far have been low-resolution thumbnails - easy to downlink. But we are now starting to get one or two hi-res versions also.

Mike Malin, the principal investigator on Mardi (Mars Descent Imager), has released a detailed view taken of the 4.5m-wide heatshield as it fell away from the rover's capsule during Monday's entry descent and landing (EDL).
"You've been hearing us say, 'just wait until you see the good stuff'. Well, this is the good stuff coming down, and it's quite spectacular," said Dr Malin.
"You can actually see the stitching in the thermal blanket; there's wiring in there also for the [heatshield sensors]."

Eventually hundreds of Mardi pictures will be run together to make a movie of the descent.
With the rover now on the ground and Mardi still pointing downwards, Malin has also got a good shot of the gravel surface under the vehicle.

One instrument on the rover has already had a chance to gather some data. This is the Radiation Assessment Detector (Rad).
Indeed, this instrument has acquired quite a lot of data so far, as it was working for periods even during the rover's cruise to Mars.
It is endeavouring to characterise the flux of high-energy atomic and subatomic particles reaching Mars from the Sun and distant exploded stars.

This radiation would be hazardous to any microbes alive on the planet today, but would also constitute a threat to the health of any future astronauts on the Red Planet.

In other news, Nasa reports it has now found more components of the landing system discarded by the rover during EDL.
These are a set of six tungsten blocks that the rover's capsule ejected to shift its centre of mass and help guide its flight through the atmosphere.
Satellite imagery has identified the line of craters these blocks made when they slammed into the ground about 12km from Curiosity's eventual landing position.

Nasa has also confirmed the precise timing of Monday's touchdown.
The rover's computer put this at 05:17:57 UTC on Mars. With a one-way light-travel time of 13 minutes and 48 seconds to cover the 250 million km to Earth, this equates to a receive time here at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of 05:31:45 UTC (GMT).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19186237

This is all fascinating stuff, and I'm looking forward to Curiosity's future hi-res images, and other discoveries.
 
Things don't always go according to plan:

Nasa's new Mars landing craft Morpheus bursts into flames on take-off
Proving what a feat of engineering the Curiosity rover truly was, Nasa's latest Mars landing project Morpheus is seen bursting into flames during a test at Kennedy Space Centre.
[video]
8:14AM BST 10 Aug 2012

Nasa has enjoyed great success with its Curiosity landing craft in recent days but their plans to launch another space rover were brought down to earth with a fiery bump at the Kennedy Space Centre.

During a so-called autonomous free-flight test, Nasa said the vehicle lifted off the ground successfully but "then experienced a hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight."

No one was injured in the accident, which followed nearly a year of testing on Morpheus.
Nasa TV footage showed the space capsule engulfed almost totally in flames after the crash, with little left to salvage.
The US space agency said engineers were looking into test data to determine the exact cause of Thursday's accident, but further details were not immediately available.

The accident came as Nasa scientists were still hailing the Mars rover Curiosity's decent and landing on the Red Planet earlier this week as a "miracle of engineering."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... e-off.html
 
Nasa's Curiosity rover zaps Mars rock called Coronation
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent

Nasa's Curiosity rover has zapped its first Martian rock.
The robot fired its ChemCam laser at a tennis-ball-sized stone lying about 2.5m away on the ground.
The brief but powerful burst of light from the instrument vapourised the surface of the rock, revealing details of its basic chemistry.

This was just target practice for ChemCam, proving it is ready to begin the serious business of investigating the geology of the Red Planet.
It is part of a suite of instruments on the one-tonne robot, which landed two weeks ago in a deep equatorial depression known as Gale Crater.

Over the course of one Martian year, Curiosity will try to determine whether past environments at its touchdown location could ever have supported life.
The US-French ChemCam instrument will be a critical part of that investigation, helping to select the most interesting objects for study.

The inaugural target of the laser was a 7cm-wide rock dubbed "Coronation" (previously N165).
It had no particular science value, and was expected to be just another lump of ubiquitous Martian basalt, a volcanic rock.
Its appeal was the nice smooth face it offered to the laser.

ChemCam zapped it with 30 pulses of infrared light during a 10-second period.

Each pulse delivered to a tiny spot more than a million watts of power for about five billionths of a second.
The instrument observed the resulting spark through a telescope; the component colours would have told scientists which atomic elements were present.

"We got a great spectrum of Coronation - lots of signal," said ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.
"Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the results. After eight years building the instrument, it's pay-off time."

The first science target for ChemCam will be bedrock exposed on the ground next to Curiosity by the rocket-powered crane used to lower the vehicle to the crater floor on 6 August (GMT).
Exhaust from this descent stage scattered surface grit and pebbles to reveal a harder, compact material underneath.

The crane made four scour marks in the ground - two either side of the rover. These have been dubbed Burnside, Goulburn, Hepburn and Sleepy Dragon - names taken from ancient rock formations in Canadian North America.
Goulburn Scour will be zapped by ChemCam once the mission team has reviewed fully the Coronation performance and results.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19314638
 
Curiosity announces death of Earth civilisation.

In a move NASA have been planning for a decade, scientists have programmed the Curiosity Rover to transmit an intergalactic distress call to announce the terminal decline of Earth's culture and the imminent downfall of civilisation. Totally embodying this tragic scenario, Will.I.Am...Really has worked continuously for the past year - only taking time out to carry the Olympic Torch a few yards - to produce a song that shows the vast intellectual emptiness and narcissism flourishing here at home.

NASA hopes the monotonous series of beats coupled with the droning of human voices which have been computer-aided to promote a plaintive wail exactly in the middle of the Katona Scale will either attract alien cultural intervention, or, better still, irritate and summon a hostile invasion force to put us out of our misery for good.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top