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Post by meldrew on Aug 2, 2012 9:48:30 GMT 1
The Mars Curiosity Landing Thread An exciting time is about to kick off with the Mars landing on monday 6th August, the lander is described as the Mars Science Laboratory, will it survive the landing this time is main worry. NASA braces for 'terror' in Mars landingWASHINGTON: The biggest, baddest space rover ever built for exploring an alien planet is nearing its August 6 landing on Mars, and the US space agency is anxious for success despite huge risks. A popular Internet video by NASA called "Seven Minutes of Terror" depicts the high drama involved with the first-ever attempt to use a rocket-powered sky crane to lower the car-sized machine gently onto the surface of the Red Planet. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory project combines a sophisticated rover, Curiosity, with a mobile chemistry kit to zap rocks and sift soil in the hunt for clues that life may once have existed on Mars. "It is pretty crazy looking, I am the first to admit," said Bill Nye, a well-known US science personality and president of the Planetary Society. "But these people who did it are the best in the world, so I think they made engineering decisions that are pretty sound." The rover aims to explore the Gale Crater on Mars, which contains a low mountain and multiple layers of sediment that NASA scientists have said they expect will reveal the unknown history of Mars. Scientists know much more about Mars today than they did 50 years ago, namely that ample amounts of water once existed there, increasing the likelihood that microbial life did too. Future hopes for Mars exploration include drilling to see if water still runs beneath the surface. For now, the one-ton (900 kilogram) rover's toolkit contains a detector for water at 50 centimeters (20 inches) beneath the surface, plus lasers, sifters, drills and cameras to analyze rocks and send back images of the Martian surface as never before seen. It is expected to land August 6 at 0531 GMT. NASA hopes it will get communications during the final minutes though a series of pings or tones that indicate when key milestones have been met. The spacecraft must separate, a supersonic parachute must deploy to lower the rover down, then a rocket-powered sky crane must activate to power the vehicle closer to the surface before lowering it with nylon tethers. It may be 15-20 minutes after the landing itself until NASA knows exactly what happened to its rover, which is twice the size of its vehicles Spirit and Opportunity. They launched in 2004 and landed with the help of airbags. "This is really the first field test for the system. That is what has got me biting my nails," said Howard McCurdy, a space historian and professor at American University. "I can think of 100 ways it could go wrong. I can think of three or four ways it could go right." The mission has been in the works for 12 years, and was conceived following the crash of NASA's Mars polar lander in 1999 when the US space agency regrouped and made plans for future attempts. G. Scott Hubbard, professor at Stanford University and former NASA Mars program director who led the planning for the Mars Science Laboratory, said he feels something like a "proud papa," but is still plenty nervous. "They have tested this as much as you can possibly test it on Earth. You have to feel confident that you have done everything you can to ensure mission success," Hubbard told AFP. "But on the other hand, Mars is notorious for throwing you the unexpected. So there is a blanket of tension that sits over the top of everything." Indeed, more than half of global space agency attempts to send landers to Mars since 1960 have failed. Bad surprises have ranged from dust storms to technical failures. "Mars is hard," said Nye, pointing out that Russia, despite all its firsts in the realm of space exploration, is "0 for 21 on Mars. Europe is 0 for 1. NASA is a little over 50 percent." But Mars remains a key focus of exploration because as Earth's nearest neighbor, it is also the planet most likely to have harbored life in the past. "It is not crazy to suggest that life started on Mars, got slung into space, and we are all descendants," said Nye. "That is worth finding out." If the landing succeeds, experts say it would give new urgency and direction to NASA's Mars program, which currently has one more orbiter, Maven, planned for launch in 2013 to hunt for methane in Mars's atmosphere, but nothing after. NASA recently bowed out of a joint project with Europe, called ExoMars, due to budgetary constraints, and faces more than $300 million in cuts to planetary science annually in the coming years. "Other missions down the road have not yet been identified, so if this is successful, it will give momentum to doing more work on Mars," said McCurdy. If it fails, Hubbard said it could spark a reexamination of the US program, and may open the way for other space agencies to take the lead. "I think the program would continue," he said, describing Mars as "certainly the ultimate goal for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit." timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/NASA-braces-for-terror-in-Mars-landing/articleshow/15324922.cms
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Post by meldrew on Aug 2, 2012 10:45:50 GMT 1
Mars Curiosity 7 Minutes of Terror
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Post by chrisperridas on Aug 2, 2012 11:43:36 GMT 1
I am anxiously waiting!
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Post by uforn on Aug 2, 2012 14:45:38 GMT 1
I hope this is successful, it looks like a lot could go wrong. If it is then we may just find some form of microbial life. But the question begs, would they tell us if they did find life ?
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Post by meldrew on Aug 2, 2012 14:56:06 GMT 1
after watching the video I don't think this landing will be a piece of cake, there is just too much to go wrong, I would like to see the enthusiastic on here 5 am monday GMT, I am excited ;D
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Post by meldrew on Aug 4, 2012 9:52:36 GMT 1
The Coolest Mars Landing Ever Attempted Touching down on another planet has never been easy, but the Curiosity rover takes it another step. By DANIEL CRAY | July 31, 2012 | You’ve probably already seen the trailer. It’s gotten 800,000 YouTube hits, it’s been shown on most major broadcast and cable news shows and its name — “Seven Minutes of Terror” — has become something of an Internet meme. But the producer of the video sensation it not one of the usual Hollywood suspects. It’s NASA — and if you think the five-minute web teaser the space agency has produced is cool, wait till you see the actual show, scheduled for Aug. 5. That’s the day the Mars Curiosity rover — the $2.5 billion, six-wheeled lab that’s the latest brainchild of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena — is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet. While the mission of the SUV-sized rover is ambitious — employing a new suite of instruments to go rambling about Mars sniffing out signs of past or even present life — other rovers have done similar things before. The landing, however, will be like nothing NASA has ever attempted. If the engineers can pull this one off, their efforts will be counted a success even before the rover can move so much as an inch across the soil. There are basically two ways to land on another world: parachutes if the planet or moon has a thick enough atmosphere, and rocket engines if it doesn’t. Right away, Mars presents problems. It’s wrapped in just enough atmosphere to slow an entering spacecraft down and give a parachute something to bite, but not enough to permit a soft and survivable landing. The previous three rovers — Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity — solved that problem with a combination of parachutes, descent rockets and, for the final plunge, a swaddling of air bags that allowed the vehicles to hit the surface and bounce across the landscape until they finally rolled to a stop and could shake off their padding. It was an ignominious way to arrive, but it got them there in one piece. But Curiosity, at 5,293 lbs. (2,400 kg), is way too heavy for the airbag model, so JPL engineers had to dream up a new approach — and dream they did. When the blunt-bottomed, conical pod carrying Curiosity slams into the Martian atmosphere on its way to a touchdown in the planet’s Gale Crater, it will be traveling at a blistering 13,000 mph (21,000 k/h). The thin air will provide enough braking force to bleed off about 93% of the speed. When the ship is about 7 mi. (11 km) above the surface and traveling 900 mph (1,448 k/h), it will at last deploy its parachute — but not just any parachute. At 51 ft. (15.5 m) in diameter with 80 suspension lines, it’s the biggest chute ever used in an extraterrestrial landing. This will slow the spacecraft down to 190 mph (305 k/h). That, of course, is not a remotely safe landing speed. So after jettisoning the no-longer needed heat shield, the ship will fire retrorockets that will slow it a crawl that actually approaches a hover. At that point, the rover could just be set gently on the surface, right? Not quite. And here things take a decidedly Jetsonian twist. Since the blasting retrorockets could stir up an instrument-damaging dust cloud as Curiosity closes in on the ground, the spacecraft will transform itself into — wait for it — a sky crane. As it reaches a 2 mph (3.2 k/h) descent speed, half of its eight engines will shut down and four nylon cords will spool out, lowering the rover the last 25 ft. (7.5 m) to the ground. Once the spacecraft senses touchdown, the descent stage will sever the cords and soar off in a flyaway maneuver. It will crash at least 500 ft. (152 m) away, sacrificing itself to make certain its rockets don’t damage the rover. “It’s like a big long chain, and all of the links have to work in order for the thing to land properly,” says Tom Rivellini, the JPL engineer who provides much of the memorable, conversational narration for the “Seven Minutes” video. “One of my best friends said, ‘you guys are kind of playing up the drama a little bit,’ but to be honest we’re actually downplaying it. So much stuff has to go right in order for the thing to not crash and burn. I’ll take the coolness factor once it works properly.” Working properly is by no means a sure thing. First of all, there are the numbers: Sixty percent of all Mars missions fail and “every landing is a first,” says Doug McQuiston, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. Then there’s another big number: two — as in the paired, redundant hardware that NASA typically designs into its ships so that if a primary system fails, a back-up can fill the breach. Two computers will control the avionics as Curiosity descends. There will also be dual explosives firing when the heat shield and other systems separate from the craft, even though only one pyrotechnic is needed for the job. But duplication is expensive in both dollars and weight, so that’s where the redundancies end. “With no humans on board we have the luxury of taking a little risk, so we turn that risk into more science and it’s a great return on investment,” Rivellini says. “But it does come at a potential cost which is, you might lose the mission because we have these single-string, complicated vehicles and things just have to go right.” Wild as the whole ideas sounds, the reality is that the landing system is actually just a next-generation version of its predecessors. Previous rovers used similar but more rudimentary radar to target the ground and simpler rockets that couldn’t be throttled. This time, JPL engineers upgraded the radar and borrowed a page from the 1970s Viking landers by adding thrust valves to the rocket motors on the descent stage. “Now we can control the velocity so well that we don’t have to make up the difference with airbags; we can just set the payload directly on the surface of Mars,” Rivellini says. If the complicated landing sequence does play out as hoped, the work that follows could produce some amazement of its own. The science payload aboard Curiosity will be 10 times bigger than that carried by any previous rover. The most important of those instruments is the soil-sampling system that will look for signs of Martian biology. “We will have a big milestone when we put the first scooped sample into the analytical lab,” says Joy Crisp, the deputy project scientist. “That will reveal the minerals, and we’ve not been able to answer that before.” The rover’s other instruments will beam x-rays into powdered rock, sniff the atmosphere, and scan different wavelengths of light, all in hopes of finding water, carbon, methane, and other life-building elements. The results should inch researchers closer to definitive answers about whether the planet serves as a model for Earth’s own past — including its early biology. Says Crisp, “We’ll have a lot more clues to put the puzzle together.” Oh, and while Hollywood may not have had a role in producing Curiosity’s celebrated web trailer the mission will still give us an action movie of sorts. An on-board camera will be recording full-color video of Curiosity’s landing, offering the first-ever view aboard a spacecraft landing on Mars. If all goes well, it seems “Seven Minutes of Terror” won’t be the last compelling video about Curiosity’s wild ride to Mars. science.time.com/2012/07/31/the-coolest-mars-landing-ever-attempted/?iid=sci-main-lede
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Post by uforn on Aug 4, 2012 12:28:43 GMT 1
I cant wait to see the footage on monday, I hope it all goes to plan. I wonder if they are showing the footage live as it comes in ?
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Post by belle on Aug 4, 2012 14:32:27 GMT 1
www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/Here is a link to Jet Propulsion Labs. They have a by the second countdown and a lot of information and videos on the soon to be landing.
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Post by uforn on Aug 4, 2012 14:53:00 GMT 1
Thanks for that belle, I hope I can stay awake long enough to watch it
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Post by meldrew on Aug 5, 2012 13:02:15 GMT 1
Watch NASA's live coverage of Mars rover landing
The big Curiosity rover, on a $2.5 billion science mission, arrives on the Red Planet Sunday evening with a most audacious maneuver The arrival of the Curiosity rover on Mars may well be the biggest, boldest extraterrestrial landing for NASA since Apollo 11 settled down on the moon on a summer's night in 1969. Curiosity is scheduled to land in the Red Planet's Gale Crater late Sunday or very, very early Monday, depending on your Earthbound time zone. Confirmation of the landing should come at about 10:31 p.m. PT Sunday for folks on the U.S. West Coast, or 1:31 a.m. ET Monday for those on the East Coast. The rover will have actually touched down before that, but there's a 14-minute communications lag time for signals traveling the 154 million miles from Mars. The space agency will begin its live coverage Sunday evening at 8:30 p.m. PT / 10:30 p.m. ET on the NASA TV site and will also show the coverage via UStream: Nasa TV www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.htmlUstream TV www.ustream.tv/The final stage of Curiosity's descent to the surface of Mars will involve being slung on tethers below the spacecraft's landing stage. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission has been in its spaceflight phase for about eight months, since a liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in late November. But the centerpiece of the mission is only just about to begin -- two Earth years of Curiosity roaming some 12 miles up a towering mound of sedimentary rock in Gale Crater known as both Aeolis Mons and Mount Sharp. The science instruments carried by Curiosity will be looking for, among other things, carbon compounds and signs of whether Mars is, or ever might have been, habitable. The rover's uphill climb will take it through eons of Mars' geological evolution. "The really cool thing about the Gale stratigraphic succession to me is it's a tour through nearly the entire history of Mars, where we can begin to understand these major changes in the environmental history of the planet," project scientist John Grotzinger said in an interview with CNET.
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Post by meldrew on Aug 5, 2012 13:26:20 GMT 1
Aging NASA science satellite on call to confirm Mars landing NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, in orbit around the red planet since 2003, will relay telemetry from Mars Science Laboratory rover during the craft's descent to the surface. (Credit: NASA) Aging NASA science satellite on call to confirm Mars landing The Curiosity Mars rover will be on its own when it attempts to land on the red planet, but scientists and engineers hope to have a ringside seat thanks to an aging NASA science satellite. by William Harwood To help scientists and engineers follow the action 154 million miles away, the trajectory of the Mars Science Laboratory was set up to make sure the rover's descent to the surface of the red planet occurs within view of three orbiting satellites. NASA's Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, along with the European Space Agency's Mars Express satellite, will capture telemetry from the Mars Science Laboratory as the spacecraft makes its nail-biting seven-minute plunge to the floor of Gale Crater overnight Sunday. But Odyssey is the only one of the three capable of "bent pipe" realtime relay, sending the UHF telemetry directly back to Earth as the descent proceeds to give anxious engineers what amounts to continuous play-by-play updates, including confirmation of landing. Touchdown is expected at 1:17 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) on Aug. 6, but radio signals confirming the event will take 13.8 minutes to cover the 154 million miles between Earth and Mars, arriving around 1:31 a.m. "Earth-received time." Unexpected problems with Odyssey's attitude control system in June changed the satellite's orbit slightly, putting it out of position for realtime data relay. But on July 24, a rocket firing was carried out that moved the spacecraft six minutes ahead in its orbit. That should enable it to beam back telemetry during most of Curiosity's descent as originally planned. "Odyssey has been working at Mars longer than any other spacecraft," Gaylon McSmith, Mars Odyssey project manager, said in a NASA statement. "So it is appropriate that it has a special role in supporting the newest arrival." MRO will record telemetry throughout the descent and play it back several hours later, after processing. MRO also will attempt to snap a picture of the MSL descent stage after parachute deploy. The Mars Express will record most of the descent and then turn back toward Earth to relay the stored telemetry to European flight controllers. They will quickly pass it along to NASA. But Odyssey is the key to realtime confirmation of a successful landing. "It'll depend on how well the link is performing, what the geometry is," said Steve Sell, an entry, descent and landing engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "There's some uncertainty in our touchdown time just based on winds, how long we're on the parachute, atmospheric density, things like that can actually spread our landing time by about plus or minus a minute or so," he said. "So depending on exactly when we touch down determines how long we actually keep that Odyssey link active." As a backup, the Mars Science Lab also will transmit simple tones directly back to Earth during the descent that will check off major events. But Earth will drop below the horizon as viewed from Curiosity well before landing, cutting off direct line-of-sight communications news.cnet.com
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Post by meldrew on Aug 5, 2012 13:53:20 GMT 1
High-stakes Mars mission relies on untried 'sky crane'At first blush, using a rocket-powered flying crane to lower a $2.5 billion nuclear-powered rover to the surface of Mars seems risky at best. But engineers say it solves a host of daunting challenges. The entry, descent and landing of the Mars Science Laboratory requires autonomous steering, a supersonic braking parachute and an innovative "sky crane" technique to lower the nuclear-powered rover to the surface of the red planet. (Credit: NASA) Curiosity's entry, descent and landing will begin at an altitude of roughly 82 miles above Mars when the spacecraft slams into the martian atmosphere at 13,200 mph. (Credit: NASA) During hypersonic flight, thruster firings will actively steer the Mars Science Laboratory descent stage to achieve a near pinpoint landing in Gale Crater. (Credit: NASA) In this computer graphic, the belly of the Curiosity rover can be seen after heat shield jettison as the spacecraft slows under its parachute. (Credit: NASA) In the make-or-break sky crane maneuver, the Curiosity rover is lowered from its rocket-powered descent stage as the car-size vehicle nears the surface of Mars. (Credit: NASA) The moment of truth: Curiosity touches down on the floor of Gale Crater. Cables connecting the rover to its rocket-powered descent stage are severed, freeing the science lab for initial checkout. (Credit: NASA)
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Post by meldrew on Aug 6, 2012 6:31:42 GMT 1
someone cocked that up by an hour which I could have had in bed, nearly there. TOUCHDOWN at 6.32, lots of back slapping and hi fives at the control centre in Passadena waiting for official announcement, this is being shown live on msm.
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Post by meldrew on Aug 6, 2012 7:48:01 GMT 1
NASA rover successfully lowered to surface of MarsIn a technological tour de force, NASA's nuclear-powered Curiosity rover was lowered to the surface of Mars by a rocket-powered flying crane late Sunday to kick off a $2.5 billion mission. by William Harwood August 5, 2012 11:13 PM PDT PASADENA, Calif.--In an unparalleled technological triumph, a one-ton nuclear-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered to the surface of Mars on the end of a 25-foot-long bridle suspended from the belly of a rocket-powered flying crane late Sunday to kick off an ambitious $2.5 billion mission. With flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory anxiously watching telemetry flowing in from Mars, 154 million miles away and 13.8 minutes after the fact, the Mars Science Laboratory rover -- Curiosity -- radioed confirmation of touchdown at 10:32 p.m. PDT (GMT-7). "Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars!" said mission control commentator Allen Chen as the flight control team erupted in cheers and applause. "It's just absolutely incredible, it doesn't get any better than this," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "I was a basket case in there, I was really on pins and needles. "It's a huge day for the nation, it's a huge day for all of our partners and it's a huge day for the American people," he said. "Everybody in the morning should be sticking their chests out, saying 'that's my rover on Mars.' Because it belongs to all of us." news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57487073-76/nasa-rover-successfully-lowered-to-surface-of-mars/
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Post by uforn on Aug 6, 2012 11:02:10 GMT 1
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Post by belle on Aug 7, 2012 11:34:18 GMT 1
Glad it made it safe. Didnt get to watch it live because we all fell asleep. Though kids were very excited in the morning about it Just me thiniking. The rover is huge and expensive. Why would you work so hard and spend so much money.....unless you already know what is there and where it is. Then will these people in charge actually tell us what they find?
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Post by uforn on Aug 13, 2012 20:52:31 GMT 1
Curiosity lands in Area 51 NASA’s latest Mars rover, Curiosity, has not begun roving the planet yet, but it is already providing scientists back on Earth with a wealth of information and awe-inspiring imagery. With data from Curiosity, and with images from the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists are mapping the Gale Crater region where Curiosity landed on August 5. And Curiosity’s landing site has been dubbed Quad 51—no relation to Area 51, according to NASA. Curiosity's landing site. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona) According to Florida Today, NASA has officially named the landing site Yellowknife, after the capital city of Northwest Territories, Canada, where geologists discovered Earth’s oldest rocks. A group of scientists responsible for mapping the area around the landing site “divided the area up into about one-mile by one-mile quads, or squares.” And Curiosity “happened to land in Quad 51.” Although Florida Today speculates that “conspiracy theorists are going to go nuts when they discover NASA’s Curiosity rover landed in Area 51 inside Gale Crater,” Curiosity science chief John Grotzinger says assigning the same number to this particular quadrangle as the secretive military installation in Nevada “was completely by accident.” Source: www.openminds.tv/curiosity-lands-in-area-51-821/
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Post by meldrew on Aug 14, 2012 14:41:11 GMT 1
Photo : NASA JPL Interactive panorama conversion: Hans Nyberg - Panoramas.dk The panorama scene of Mars Full size image at link below: files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/jk5023b4c9.jpgAdmin Note:Edit to resize image it was a damned big photo, this one below is a nice photo that fits the thread lol, what ever happened to uforns portugese photo correspondent.
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Post by uforn on Aug 19, 2012 14:12:17 GMT 1
Amy Shira Teitel talks about Curiosity and space exploration - Spacing out! Amy Shira Teitel is a space blogger who specializes in spaceflight history. She was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the landing of Curiosity on Mars, providing real-time coverage of the event. We talk with Amy about Curiosity, and about space exploration. We also discuss colonizing Mars, ongoing UFO sightings in South Carolina, and other space and UFO news on this episode of Spacing Out! ***AMY'S WEBSITE*** www.amyshirateitel.com/vintagespace***OPEN MINDS*** For all the latest news, visit www.openminds.tvwww.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=L2Iw0nTuqWY#
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Post by Deleted on Aug 19, 2012 20:22:50 GMT 1
Hello All,
I've been staring at her eyes...............hybrid?
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Post by meldrew on Aug 20, 2012 10:19:56 GMT 1
Curiosity Mars rover blasts first rock with laserSummary: A test run of the ChemCam laser on Sunday saw a fist-sized rock called Coronation blasted with 30 laser pulses, so Curiosity can work out the composition of the rock's surface By David Meyer | August 20, 2012 -- 08:14 GMT (09:14 BST) The Mars rover Curiosity has successfully tested its ChemCam laser for the first time on the Red Planet, using it to blast the surface of a small rock. Part of Curiosity's mission is to figure out whether Mars was ever inhabitable, and whether its rocks contain any kind of fuel. To accomplish this, it will use the laser to check the surface composition of interesting-looking rocks, then drill out powder samples if it wants to further analyse a particular rock. The first test of Curiosity's ChemCam, which produced the inset images (Image credit: NASA) The first of those techniques is called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy. The fist-sized target-practice rock, now known as Coronation but originally given the temporary name of N165, was chosen for the test because it was next to Curiosity and had a smooth surface. On Sunday it received 30 pulses from the ChemCam laser, each of which created a spark, within 10 seconds. The instrument recorded spectra from these sparks, to establish the chemical composition of Coronation's surface and to see whether the composition changed during the series of pulses. "We got a great spectrum of Coronation — lots of signal," ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in a statement. "Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the results. After eight years building the instrument, it's payoff time!" ChemCam deputy project scientist Sylvestre Maurice, of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, added that the data received from the Coronation test were better than those from early tests on Earth. "It's so rich, we can expect great science from investigating what might be thousands of targets with ChemCam in the next two years," Maurice said. Roadmap On Friday, NASA revealed which part of the Gale Crater it had chosen as Curiosity's first destination. The rover will head over to an area, dubbed Glenelg, that represents an intersection between three types of terrain. One of those types is layered bedrock, and the team has this in mind for Curiosity's first serious drilling. Glenelg is around 400m east-south-east of Curiosity's landing site "With such a great landing spot in Gale Crater, we literally had every degree of the compass to choose from for our first drive," project scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement. "We had a bunch of strong contenders. It is the kind of dilemma planetary scientists dream of, but you can only go one place for the first drilling for a rock sample on Mars." "That first drilling will be a huge moment in the history of Mars exploration." www.zdnet.com/curiosity-mars-rover-blasts-first-rock-with-laser-7000002854/
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Post by uforn on Aug 22, 2012 13:23:50 GMT 1
Hello All, I've been staring at her eyes...............hybrid? Dont know about a hybrid but she sure is hot
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Post by uforn on Sept 14, 2012 15:22:43 GMT 1
Rover ready to roll: Curiosity begins search for life on Mars This NASA handout image obtained August 1, 2012 shows an artist's conception of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life. (AFP Photo/ NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU) NASA scientists are set to initiate the next phase of Mars rover Curiosity’s mission, where it will drill rocks and analyze collected samples in its lab. That mission, however, could be jeopardized by the possible contamination of the rover. The six-wheeled, car-sized craft has yet to test its camera-equipped robotic arm’s ability to deliver rock and soil samples to a tray for analysis, NASA said. Scientists also hope to record footage of Phobos, one of Mars’ moons, as it passes against the sun. Jennifer Trosper, Curiosity’s mission director, said that the rover has "performed almost flawlessly." The next step following tests will be to "drive, drive, drive," she said. The mission’s long-awaited start was delayed last week when it was revealed that Curiosity may have been contaminated by bacteria from Earth. NASA engineers were concerned that the landing might damage the rover’s drilling mechanism, rendering it unable to open a box with sterilized drill bit and load it. So, shortly before launch, they pre-loaded a drill. NASA claimed the move was a calculated risk: It is unlikely that microbial stowaways made it to Mars on the piece of equipment, and even less likely that bacterium that did survive the trip could revive by attaching to water or ice samples collected during the research. The penny in this image is part of a camera calibration target on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on Mars September 9, 2012. (AFP Photo/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems) On Friday, the rover is expected to hit the road and begin its journey to ‘Glenelg,’ located some 400 meters from its current position. Three types of terrain converge there, enabling Curiosity to drill for several different rock types and collect samples for study in its onboard chemical lab. Previous test runs of the rover involved a 110-meter-long drive, and calibration of the robotic arm-mounted camera dubbed the ‘Mars Hand Lens Imager’ (MAHLI). The rover successfully operated the camera after opening MAHLI’s dust cap for the first time since landing on Mars. The calibration target includes a 1909 Lincoln penny – a symbolic nod to geologists' tradition of using a coin or a similar small object as a reference in close-ups of rock samples. MAHLI Principal Investigator Ken Edgett, who purchased the penny, said the Martian setting was something “the people who minted these coins never imagined.” The Curiosity is part of a $2.5 billion mission by the Mars Science Lab. The project aims to study several locations inside the basin of the Gale Crater near the planet’s equator in a search for evidence that Mars was once able to sustain life. A particular point of interest for the mission is Aeolis Mons, a mound of rocks believed to be the remains of sediment that once filled the basin. Source: rt.com/news/curiosity-rover-ready-drive-029/
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Post by ronologic on Sept 16, 2012 19:14:10 GMT 1
As far as the Curiosity Project is concerned, I hope it answers the question, "Are we Alone" for the nonbelievers.
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Post by dbh on Nov 20, 2012 22:55:58 GMT 1
Could it be disclosure of some kind??? stay tuned.... source - space.com www.space.com/18565-mars-rover-curiosity-discovery-mystery.htmlMars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history booksNASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest. The discovery was made by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover's onboard chemistry lab, and it's capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. SAM apparently spotted something interesting in a soil sample Curiosity's huge robotic arm delivered to the instrument recently. "This data is gonna be one for the history books," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told NPR. "It's looking really good." The rover team won't be ready to announce just what SAM found for several weeks, NPR reported, as scientists want to check and double-check the results. Indeed, Grotzinger confirmed to SPACE.com that the news will come out at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which takes place Dec. 3-7 in San Francisco. The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. The car-size robot carries 10 different instruments to aid in its quest, but SAM is the rover's heart, taking up more than half of its science payload by weight. In addition to analyzing soil samples, SAM also takes the measure of Red Planet air. Many scientists are keen to see if Curiosity detects any methane, which is produced by many lifeforms here on Earth. A SAM analysis of Curiosity's first few sniffs found no definitive trace of the gas in the Martian atmosphere, but the rover will keep looking. Curiosity began driving again Friday (Nov. 16) after spending six weeks testing its soil-scooping gear at a site called "Rocknest." The rover will soon try out its rock-boring drill for the first time on the Red Planet, scientists have said.
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Aelius
Researcher
Deep Thought.
Posts: 178
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Post by Aelius on Nov 21, 2012 10:30:57 GMT 1
Most likely found exactly what they were looking for.
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Post by meldrew on Nov 21, 2012 18:16:41 GMT 1
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Post by dbh on Nov 21, 2012 18:27:37 GMT 1
If that is a photo of the discovery, then yes, I agree, it looks to be artificial, almost like a piece of plastic.
But why go to such lengths as to make such an announcement?
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uforn
Administrator
Investigator In Training
In Search For The Truth
Posts: 5,400
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Post by uforn on Nov 21, 2012 18:32:05 GMT 1
Ive moved your posts to here guys
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Post by meldrew on Nov 30, 2012 13:58:06 GMT 1
The Big Curiosity Rover Discovery Is a Big Misunderstanding When Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger sat down with NPR on Nov. 13, it was to discuss the rover’s mission on Mars. But when the interview aired last week, it was just one quote on soil samples that made headlines: “This data is gonna be one for the history books.” It didn’t take long for Twitter, Facebook and even other news organizations to pick up the quote. Similar to a childhood game of “Telephone,” that statement ballooned into one of the week’s biggest stories: After just a few months on Mars, the Curiosity rover had made, in the NPR reporter’s words, an “earth-shaking” discovery. One so big that NASA had to quadruple-check the results. That rumor, however, isn’t exactly accurate. The quote heard around the world came shortly after Grotzinger explained that NASA had just received the initial data from Curiosity’s first soil experiment using a new Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which is capable of identifying organic compounds. Naturally, the public assumed that this meant Curiosity had discovered a complex organic molecule. But while NASA does have the latest soil samples, the mission team tells Mashable that researchers haven’t determined that particular groundbreaking discovery. In fact, the rover drove away from the location just five days later, taking more samples along the way. What Grotzinger was actually trying to convey is that Curiosity’s data over her entire two-year mission will further our knowledge of Mars more than ever before, making it a historical mission. This is entirely factual. In her short time on the Red Planet, Curiosity has already made significant discoveries — like finding an ancient streambed where water once flowed. More recently, she determined that astronauts could survive Mars radiation levels. As for Grotzinger’s comment about checking and re-checking the data before releasing it to the public, that’s just standard scientific procedure. This is especially true when it’s the first set of data from a new instrument. NASA Social Media Manager Veronica McGregor, who is part of the three-woman team that manages Curiosity’s social media, says the rover’s Nov. 21 tweet was an effort to clear up the misunderstanding: What did I discover on Mars? That rumors spread fast online. My team considers this whole mission “one for the history books” — Curiosity Rover (@marscuriosity) November 21, 2012 “It’s always difficult to quell rumors like this one,” McGregor says. “But at the same time it’s great to see so many people are excited and interested in what the rover might find.” No one is saying there isn’t a major discovery in Curiosity’s future. It just hasn’t happened yet. If and when that does happen, it’s important to note that NASA wouldn’t announce a major discovery on a news network. In fact, the agency only makes major announcements via press conferences at its headquarters. According to McGregor, the agency does have a press conference slated for Dec. 3 at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting, but it has been on the books since Curiosity actually landed on Mars and does not coincide with a major announcement. “Curiosity’s mission is producing an unprecedented volume of valuable science data,” Grotzinger tells Mashable. “Much of this will help us better glimpse the very ancient environments of Mars, that are regarded to have been the most habitable in the planet’s history. We have only just started on this journey back in time.” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will display Curiosity’s latest progress and observations at the AGU conference in San Francisco. mashable.com/2012/11/27/curiosity-rover-discovery-npr/
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