Invading Mars

[don]

Nasa

[peakishmael]

Re: Invading Mars

"Seven minutes of terror" - the hardest thing ever attempted in robotic planetary exploration.

[don]

Re: Invading Mars

Got my attention.

Go Human Endeavor!

[wayiwalk]

Re: Invading Mars

I'm sure it will be in the news for 20 seconds or so on August 5 or 6, but I added a note to my calendar to check in on this in advance.....

[BadJuju]

Re: Invading Mars

So amazing. If only all the money we have spent on financial BS would have went to scientific endeavors like this, the human race would be in a much better place.

[don]

Re: Invading Mars

So amazing. If only all the money we have spent on financial BS would have went to scientific endeavors like this, the human race would be in a much better place.

Here's a suggestion (for another time and another place . . .) - eliminate the tax-exempt status of organized religion and put those funds into NASA and other science endeavors.

[don]

Re: Invading Mars

The Rover has Landed . . .

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news...06aug_success/

[Fiat Currency]

Re: Invading Mars

Exciting achievement. It should be an amazing few years for the rover, as that's one interesting (and massive) crater that they picked to explore. 8 years later, and the rover Opportunity is still cruising Mars' southern hemisphere.

Well done NASA.

[peakishmael]

Re: Invading Mars

Exciting achievement. It should be an amazing few years for the rover, as that's one interesting (and massive) crater that they picked to explore. 8 years later, and the rover Opportunity is still cruising Mars' southern hemisphere.

Well done NASA.

Speaking for NASA, where I work, in the Science Mission Directorate at HQ, which funds this Project - thanks!

That said, and at the risk of continuing a debate from another thread -- we did not do this by ourselves. It took ~150 million American taxpayers, political support from two Administrations and multiple Congresses, plus contributions from industrial partners and seven other nations.

[don]

Re: Invading Mars

the hits just keep on coming . . .

NASA's Curiosity Rover Caught in the Act of Landing

August 6, 2012: 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.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news...aug_parachute/

[don]

Re: Invading Mars

Where Will Curiosity Go First?

[don]

Re: Invading Mars

Curiosity Zaps First Martian Rock


August 19, 2012: NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has fired its laser for the first time on Mars. On Aug. 19th the mission's ChemCam instrument hit a fist-sized rock named "Coronation" with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period. Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second.

The energy from the laser creates a puff of ionized, glowing plasma. ChemCam catches the light with a telescope and analyzes it with three spectrometers for information about what elements are in the rock. The spectrometers record 6,144 different wavelengths of ultraviolet, visible and infrared light.

"We got a great spectrum of Coronation -- lots of signal," said ChemCam Principal Investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M. "Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the results. After eight years building the instrument, it's payoff time!"

This composite image, with magnified insets, depicts the first laser test by the ChemCam, instrument aboard NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.

ChemCam recorded spectra from each of the 30 pulses. The goal of this initial use of the laser on Mars was to serve as target practice for characterizing the instrument, but the activity may provide additional value. Researchers will check whether the composition changed as the pulses progressed. If it did change, that could indicate dust or other surface material being penetrated to reveal different composition beneath the surface.

"It's surprising that the data are even better than we ever had during tests on Earth, in signal-to-noise ratio," said ChemCam Deputy Project Scientist Sylvestre Maurice of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. "It's so rich, we can expect great science from investigating what might be thousands of targets with ChemCam in the next two years."

The technique used by ChemCam, called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, has been used to determine composition of targets in other extreme environments, such as inside nuclear reactors and on the sea floor, and has had experimental applications in environmental monitoring and cancer detection. Today's investigation of Coronation is the first use of the technique in interplanetary exploration.


ChemCam was developed, built and tested by the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in partnership with scientists and engineers funded by the French national space agency, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and research agency, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project, including Curiosity, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the rover.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news...ug_curiosity3/

[don]

Re: Invading Mars

The layered face of Mount Sharp. The higher layers are steeply slanted relative to those of the underlying rock.

[GRG55]

Re: Invading Mars

Some pretty amazing 360 deg panoramas from the Curiosity Rover:

http://www.360cities.net/image/curio...2.61,7.59,13.2

[don]

Re: Invading Mars

Boffo!