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NASA rover - Curiousity - touchdown confirmed (1 Viewer)

Mario Kart

Mario Kart

Footballguy
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Mars rover was on its final approach to the red planet on Sunday, heading toward a mountain that may hold clues about whether life has ever existed on Mars, officials said.The rover, also known as Curiosity, has been careening toward Mars since its launch in November. The nuclear-powered rover the size of a compact car is expected to end its 352-million-mile (567-million-km) journey on August 6 at 1:31 a.m. EDT.The landing zone is a 12-mile-by-4-mile (20-km-by-7-km) area inside an ancient impact basin known as Gale Crater, located near the planet's equator. The crater, one of the lowest places on Mars, has a 3-mile-high (5-km-high) mountain of what appears to be layers of sediment.Scientists suspect the crater may have once been the floor of a lake.If so, they believe that sediments likely filled the crater, but were carried away over time, leaving only the central mound.Readying to travel the last stretch to its landing site, Curiosity fired its steering thrusters for six seconds early Sunday, tweaking its flight path by 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per second."I will not be surprised if this was our last trajectory correction maneuver," chief navigator Tomas Martin-Mur, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.Curiosity is expected to hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at 1:24 a.m. EDT on August 6. If all goes as planned, seven minutes later the rover will be standing on its six wheels on the dry, dusty surface of Mars.Landing is by no means guaranteed. To transport the one-ton rover and position it near the mound, engineers devised a complicated system that includes a 52-foot (16-metre) diameter supersonic parachute, a rocket-powered aerial platform and a so-called "sky crane" designed to lower the rover on a tether to the ground.NASA last week successfully repositioned its Mars-orbiting Odyssey spacecraft so that it would be able to monitor Curiosity's descent and landing and radio the information back to ground controllers in as close to real time as possible.Earth and Mars are so far apart that radio signals, which travel at the speed of light, take 13.8 minutes for a one-way journey.
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Lets all hope this does not end up like the Mars Climate Orbiter or Beagle 2.
 
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This is a fantastic 5 minute video that shows how many things have to go right for this landing to work. It has been dubbed the seven minutes of terror.

 
'NewlyRetired said:
This is a fantastic 5 minute video that shows how many things have to go right for this landing to work. It has been dubbed the seven minutes of terror.

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Hey, I just read out of 38 missions to Mars, 19 of them have been successful. So, this could make number 20! Sweet!
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/mars-rover-curiosity-landing-where-to-watch-and-what-youll-see/2012/08/03/c79c20ac-dd77-11e1-af1d-753c613ff6d8_blog.html?wprss=rss_national

Mars rover Curiosity landing: Where to watch and what you’ll see

By Emi Kolawole

View Photo Gallery: A multibillion-dollar gamble, a most scary landing and possibly learning whether Mars once could have supported life — briefly, that’s what’s at stake in NASA’s Mars Curiosity mission, set to touch down early Monday. Mars is a difficult place to get to — only about a third of the 44 missions there have succeeded. Curiosity is the most ambitious and complex Mars mission ever conceived, writes Marc Kaufman, author of “First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth.’’ Soon, we’ll know whether Curiosity’s creators were brilliant and farseeing — or reaching too far.

The Mars rover Curiosity is scheduled to land in the early morning hours of Monday, Aug. 6.

If you’re wondering just how big a deal the Curiosity mission is, The Post’s Marc Kaufman captures the significance and drama of the anticipated landing.

First, the takeaway superlative for the landing: It “will be the most complex and hair-raising in planetary history.” And for the mission? It is, writes Kaufman, “the most ambitious, the most costly ($2.5 billion) and the most high-stakes mission ever to another planet.”

Other superlatives include the fact that Curiosity is the largest and heaviest human-made object to land on Mars, a critical step if humans are ever to visit the planet. Curiosity is also the first rover to search for the building blocks of life on the Red Planet — the first since the Viking Missions of the ’70s.

As you’ve probably gleaned by now, for NASA followers and fans, to say nothing of the casual observer, the mission is a must-see event. You may be thinking, “That’s great, but where can I watch it?”

NASA’s coverage of the event is scheduled to begin at 11:30 p.m. Sunday night and go until 4 a.m. Monday morning. The landing itself is scheduled for 1:31 a.m. Monday. Unlike the hour-by-hour video coverage of SpaceX’s historic docking with the international space station, don’t expect gorgeous panorama shots of the planet surface immediately after landing. Curiosity will not feed back video as it goes through its “seven minutes of terror” landing sequence. Instead, NASA’s live coverage will center around non-video telemetry. The first images to reach Earth will be low-resolution black and white images after the rover has landed. The high-resolution, color images are expected to be beamed back 48 hours later, after the main mast deploys.

Patience may be the name of the game when it comes to photos and video, but it’s not for social media, on which NASA is very active. The agency’s Twitter account has over 2.5 million followers. And the Curiosity landing has its own twitter account, @MarsCuriosity, hashtag, #MSL and Facebook page. NASA also has a number of live-streaming channels on U Stream. For those looking for breaking news, NASA plans to broadcast news of the landing across platforms, with watch parties happening at a number of NASA locations. If you can’t make it to any of those and you live in New York, however, NASA’s live coverage will be broadcast on the Toshiba screen on the main Jumbotron in Times Square.

Yes, folks, this is that big of a deal.

Of all the coverage of Curiosity, however, my favorite outline comes from NASA lead scientist John Grunsfeld during an Aug. 1 interview on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. Colbert’s joke that Curiosity’s 14-minute communication delay is shorter than NBC’s tape-delayed Olympics coverage aside, the interview is a nice summation of what to expect from Curiosity.

During the interview, Grunsfeld walks through the “seven minutes of terror” and makes a “bold prediction,” saying, “the Curiosity rover is going to discover nothing on Mars. ... It’s not going to discover a thing.” But, continued Grunsfeld, “people on Earth, the scientists on Earth are going to discover all kinds of incredible things. We’re just going to love it. It’s going to be two years of amazing science.”

And those two years all start Sunday night and hinge on seven critical minutes.
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It must be because of weight, but I'm scratching my head as to why they didn't just use the tried-and-true airbag method for landing. Why try something completely different with so many steps that could go wrong?

 
'Zasada said:
It must be because of weight, but I'm scratching my head as to why they didn't just use the tried-and-true airbag method for landing. Why try something completely different with so many steps that could go wrong?
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IIRC, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were about 400 pounds each. This thing is over a ton. Physics is not on our side trying to slow it down.
 
'Samuel L Bronkowitz said:
'Zasada said:
It must be because of weight, but I'm scratching my head as to why they didn't just use the tried-and-true airbag method for landing. Why try something completely different with so many steps that could go wrong?
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IIRC, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were about 400 pounds each. This thing is over a ton. Physics is not on our side trying to slow it down.
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I thought I read somewhere that it was also due to the fragile nature of the instruments on this thing. Also, the wheel base, which is fragile, is not going to be covered up at all and will need to be set down upright without the hopes that the airbags would right itself. I think the main reason is due to the fragile nature though.
 
Mars landing: Do-or-die time for Curiosity rover; it's on its own

With just over 24 hours till the "seven minutes of terror" -- when Mars rover Curiosity makes its unprecedented, hellbent-for-leather descent to the surface of Mars -- the NASA rover team sits and waits. And, perhaps, paces.

After a command sent a few days ago, “we literally could do nothing more,” says the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Ashwin Vasavada.

That was when the Curiosity team sent a directive zooming through space -- 35 million miles or so -- to Earth’s latest ambassador to Mars, telling it to put its plan into action.

PHOTOS: A closer look at the mission and the rover

“We sent a command to the spacecraft to start its onboard program to execute the final approach, entry, descent and landing,” Vasavada told the Los Angeles Times in an interview late Friday. “We literally could do nothing more, and the spacecraft will land itself.”

On Thursday, mission project manager Pete Theisinger told The Times that things were quiet -- eerily so. "I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop."

A dust storm was causing scientists some concern Thursday, and a dust storm on Mars is no small worry. In April, NASA photographed a massive dust devil that extended from the surface of the Red Planet 12 miles up into the atmosphere.

At the time, Vasavada, deputy project scientist with the Mars Science Laboratory at JPL, called the size of the Mars dust devil "unique."

As the sun beats down on the desert-like surface of Mars, he explained, convection begins. "Conditions allowed this single giant vortex to form and survive," he said.

The current dust storm has been swirling south of the intended landing site of Curiosity -- about 600 miles away. But despite the distance, the size means it could create a worrisome cloud of dust at the landing site.

Still, the rover was engineered to be able to fend off Mars' nasty weather, Theisinger said -- save a "great-grandmother of all storms."

Early last month, NASA released a video of the final minutes of the Mars rover landing that stirred space fans' interest in a dramatic fashion. "Seven Minutes of Terror" has a thrumming soundtrack and the feel of a movie preview. The "Terror" video spotlights the unprecedented nature of the landing -- it's a procedure unlike any ever attempted. Here, briefly, is what has to happen:

1) The spacecraft's heat shield has to withstand temperatures of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit as the craft enters Mars' atmosphere and slows from its entry speed of 13,000 miles per hour.

2) The supersonic parachute must work. Several miles above the surface of the planet, the parachute must pop open while the spacecraft is still moving at almost twice the speed of sound.

3) Curiosity must emerge from the shell attached to the parachute, with rockets blazing, to further slow the descent speed.

4) In what's called the "Sky Crane maneuver," the rover must successfully be lowered via cables.

NASA scientists have continually expressed a sunny confidence in their ability to accomplish this feat. But now it's do-or-die time, with the rover set to land at 10:30 p.m. Sunday.

There's a 14-minute time lag for all radio signals traveling from Mars to Earth, Vasavada said in an earlier interview. That's how long the hundreds of scientists involved in the project will have to wait to find out if something occurred to kill their mission.

Can 700 scientists hold their breath for 14 minutes?
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In before some "discovery" is going to be construed to imply the possibility of the conditions where life could exist; I'll be watching though.

 
'Mario Kart said:
'matuski said:
'pittstownkiller said:
In before some "discovery" is going to be construed to imply the possibility of the conditions where life could exist; I'll be watching though.
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Those pesky discoveries, always putting dents in our current understandings.
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I've been combing my Bible all morning to figure out where God created Martian life. I haven't found anything.
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All you have to do is actually wait for it to be discovered but if you're impatient I am sure NASA will announce a big discovery of something that could possibly be construed as having the building blocks to having the suggestion that it looks like something that has to do with an item that has been seen in connection with water and then of course you have life; grant more research funding based on our "discovery" of life on Mars.
 
My link

How to Watch the Mars Curiosity Rover Landing

NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover is making its final approach to the Red Planet and is expected to touch down at 1:31 a.m. Eastern on Monday, August 6 after a 350 million-mile journey that kicked off in November.

PCMag's Meredith Popolo is currently at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. to cover the historic landing, and will have all the details on PCMag shortly. But if you want to stay up late and follow the landing live, here's how to watch.

Official coverage of the landing will begin on NASA TV at 8:30 p.m. Pacific and 11:30 p.m. Eastern on Sunday night.

On UStream, the NASAJPL stream will include landing-day commentary from those involved in the Curiosity project. Before the official landing program begins, NASA will provide a status update from 9:30 - 10:30 a.m. Pacific, followed by a preview of the Mars landing from 3-4 p.m. and landing coverage that starts at 8:30 p.m. The HD NASAJPL2 stream will be restricted to Mission Control transmissions.

Microsoft has also added a Mars Rover section to the Xbox 360 dashboard on the main page, Xbox Live programming director Larry Hryb wrote in a blog post this week. The section includes a quiz on the mission, details about the engineering behind the rover, and more. Xbox Live will link up with NASA TV so you can tap into the final landing footage directly from the console. Last month, NASA released a game for the Xbox 360 designed to give users a peek into what landing the next Mars rover will be like.

San Francisco's Exploratorium will also feature a webcast beginning at 10:15 p.m. Pacific. The museum currently houses a 7-foot replica of the Curiosity rover, on loan from JPL until Sept. 16. Once the rover starts its mission, the Exploratorium will have access to high-res images from Curiosity, which will be viewable during live webcasts online and at the museum on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays at 1 p.m. Pacific.

If you live near New York City and enjoy Times Square in the middle of the night, the Toshiba Vision screen in the neighborhood will air the landing, with coverage beginning at 11:30 p.m. Eastern and running until 4 a.m. The screen is situated just beneath New Year's Eve ball in Times Square. To hear the audio, tap into Third Rock Radio via the NASA homepage or the TuneIn mobile app.

For those not in the Big Apple, NASA has compiled a list of various Curiosity viewing parties around the country. That includes L.A.'s Griffith Observatory and NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

Social Media, Apps

If you can't tap into a video feed, there are plenty of options for following along via social media. The rover has its own Twitter feed @marscuriosity as well as a Facebook page. But here are a few other feeds that will be following the action, as well as a few apps to keep you busy while you wait.

@NASAJPL: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

@MarsRovers: The official mission Twitter of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

@mgpopolo: PCMag's Meredith Popolo is at JPL this weekend to cover the landing. Stay connected with her tweets.

@PCMag: Meredith will also be live-tweeting from the PCMag Twitter feed as the landing results come in.

Storify: Read through PCMag's recent Mars coverage while you wait, as well as recent tweets, and even a "7 Minutes of Terror" infographic from NASA.

Space Images (iOS and Android): Discover stunning images and videos of space, stars and planets, including Earth and the sun, at your fingertips with the Space Images app from NASA's JPL.

Spacecraft 3D (iOS): An augmented reality app that lets you learn about and interact with a variety of spacecraft, including Curiosity.

NASA Be a Martian (iOS, Android, Windows Phone): The Be A Martian app lets you experience Mars as if you were there. Take part in discovery as it happens and join a community of worldwide explorers, NASA said.
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Definitely going to tune in.
 
Wow, for 2.5 billion I would like more of a guarantee that it would at least land safely. But with that simple landing process, would could possibly go wrong? :unsure:

 
'pittstownkiller said:
'Mario Kart said:
'matuski said:
'pittstownkiller said:
In before some "discovery" is going to be construed to imply the possibility of the conditions where life could exist; I'll be watching though.
Click to expand...
Those pesky discoveries, always putting dents in our current understandings.
Click to expand...
I've been combing my Bible all morning to figure out where God created Martian life. I haven't found anything.
Click to expand...
All you have to do is actually wait for it to be discovered but if you're impatient I am sure NASA will announce a big discovery of something that could possibly be construed as having the building blocks to having the suggestion that it looks like something that has to do with an item that has been seen in connection with water and then of course you have life; grant more research funding based on our "discovery" of life on Mars.
Click to expand...
Like this?
 
Didn't the Beagle 2 rover catch a glimpse of alien life on Mars right before it failed?

 
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I foresee a problem with the Flux Capacitor during re-entry into the Mars atmosphere.

Here's hoping everything goes well.

:FINGERS CROSSED:

:nerd:

 
The way these NASA guys are talking, failure is expected and success would be a welcomed surprise. Not bad for 2.5 billion.

 
They have heart beat tones indicating things are good.

Continuation of deceleration.

Parachute is about to deploy.

 
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