Watching all these incredible people at JPL react to the successful result of their work is absolutely wonderful. The video is about 11 minutes long and it starts with Curiosity’s descent onto Mars. Then there’s the reaction to her actual landing and the first pictures, which arrived so quickly! It’s an exciting, moving experience to see the joy from all the people who have worked so hard to get our rover up there. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
Also, Curiosity is tweeting from Mars! You can follow her at @CuriosityRover 🙂
BTW, this is exactly the kind of work Obama has killed. We are now enjoying a project set into motion years ago. I can’t wait to send the maniacs in charge of Washington packing. I do wonder when Obama will remind the rocket scientists that they didn’t send Curiosity up there, that it was the local highway that did it.
NASA Lands Car-Size Rover Beside Martian Mountain
NASA’s most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation.
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars, including the final severing of the bridle cords and flyaway maneuver of the rocket backpack.“Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars. Curiosity, the most sophisticated rover ever built, is now on the surface of the Red Planet, where it will seek to answer age-old questions about whether life ever existed on Mars — or if the planet can sustain life in the future,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “This is an amazing achievement, made possible by a team of scientists and engineers from around the world and led by the extraordinary men and women of NASA and our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. President Obama has laid out a bold vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030’s, and today’s landing marks a significant step toward achieving this goal.”
Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5, PDT, (1:32 a.m. EDT Aug. 6) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life.
“The Seven Minutes of Terror has turned into the Seven Minutes of Triumph,” said NASA Associate Administrator for Science John Grunsfeld. “My immense joy in the success of this mission is matched only by overwhelming pride I feel for the women and men of the mission’s team.”
I watched it live, Texas Time. An incredible technical achievement!!!
posted 8/6 1216pm Texas[Sky Crane!]Time
Its funny these engineers can land a rover-probe on mars, but 80% of them miss high-fiving each other!
Geeks Gone Wild! 😉
As an RN on a cardiac telemetry unit, I was very aware that all of our equipment to monitor the electrical heart impulses were only available because of the amazing technical abilities of the NASA programs.How much knowledge will we miss by the ending of such programs. Kudos to the Mars guys.
Flying to Mars and gently landing a large vehicle on a dime is a staggering tribute to the human spirit. We’ve extended our senses to another planet. Congratulations to the NASA team. Took far less resources than the recent solar scams.
The soft landing made by Curiosity is a pretty big deal. The previous rovers made their final descent by bouncing in a huge inflated cocoon. It was a simpler operation, so it was more inherently robust, but less precise, and perhaps more room for your lander to end up in a bad place. This device, after being slowed by first a heat shield and then a parachute, switched to a rocket landing, more like the lunar lander. The final stage was what they called the “skycrane”, which must have been spectacular, with the lander being lowered to the surface by a cable from a stationary rocket. So it was a complicated series of steps, of course entirely done by automated procedure.
It had been questionable whether NASA would be receiving the live updates as the craft landed, but they got that working. So the vital news during the landing were the progress reports of continued deceleration as the lander cycled through the various stages. This confirmed everything was working, slowing the hurtling spacecraft down bit by bit until the skycrane deployed.
Of course the news we heard was 14 minutes delayed, due to speed-of-light lag. So everything we were learning had already happened a quarter hour ago.
Curiosity is of course a legacy program from the Bush era. A report: “As rover Curiosity lands, Mars exploration program fights for its life”.
Now, will Uncle Martin pose for a photo-op with the lander outside of his Martian villa?
i hate to be a spoilsport, but do they really need that many different camera views of the control room? i’m used to watching the streams from NASA TV where it’s just one fixed camera mounted at mission control from above. this almost seemed like they hired the same production company that works on that TMZ show, and it’s a bit unsettling. like they made it less about the mission and like a reality show about these engineers, who also seemed very into being on camera as well.
The Twitter Stream from Curiosity is very funny and clever! It tweets in the 1st person! LOL!
posted 8/7 800am Texas[Mars Needs Moms!]Time
I didn’t know there were Muslim’s on Mars. Isn’t that NASA’s new mission statement?