At a press briefing on 2 August, chief scientist John Grotzinger said he was thrilled to have the chance to land on Mars. Curiosity carries ten instruments, a 2.1 m robotic arm and a drill that can bore 2.5 cm into rock, deeper than any earlier Mars rover could reach. NASA's Michael Meyer called it the first roving analytical laboratory sent to any planet. Source
TheyKnow wrote:and then the whole relay hinges on an eleven-year-old orbiter like Odyssey that just had wheel trouble and went into safe mode only a couple weeks back!1. Odyssey is only needed for immediate confirmation. Both the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express record the telemetry and will send it down hours later.
asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.PintOfMild wrote:Anyone fancy a celebratory pint down the pub if they pull it off?Pint sounds grand, though I'll believe the landing when I see actual telemetry on my screen.
asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.PintOfMild wrote:getting the beast down in one piece is half the battle!Equating the mechanical descent with the scientific mission is a fundamental error. An intact rover that suffers an avionics failure, a jammed drill mechanism, or contaminated sample chambers would merely represent a very expensive piece of scrap iron on the Martian regolith. The landing is an engineering prerequisite, nothing more. Its scientific merit rests entirely upon whether the instruments can reliably extract and process empirical data over the coming years. Planning pub visits before a single packet of scientific telemetry has even been verified seems remarkably premature.
asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.Landing chief Adam Steltzner told reporters that the sky crane looks a little crazy but is the least crazy way to land a rover as big as Curiosity. Legs, as used by Viking and Phoenix, would make such a large rover unstable, and it is too heavy for airbags. The plan: hit the atmosphere at about 21,000 km/h, open a parachute about 11 km up, slow to about 320 km/h, then use rockets to slow to under 3 km/h before lowering the rover on cables. Source
asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.The European Space Agency says its Mars Express orbiter will record Curiosity's radio signals during the descent, from 07:09 to 07:37 CEST on 6 August (05:09-05:37 UTC), as a backup to NASA's own tracking. ESA's New Norcia station in Australia will also listen for the signals directly. The recordings will be sent to JPL straight away. Mars Express images also helped NASA shrink Curiosity's landing ellipse to about 20 x 7 km. Source
NASA has awarded $1.1 billion to three companies to develop spacecraft to carry astronauts: Boeing gets $460 million, SpaceX $440 million and Sierra Nevada $212.5 million for its Dream Chaser space plane. Since the space shuttle retired last year, NASA has depended on Russian Soyuz flights to the space station, at about $63 million a seat. Source
For the first 90 days after landing, Curiosity's controllers will work on Martian time, with each day about 24 hours and 40 minutes long. Deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada says this gets the most out of the new rover. Most images will come home through relays by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey, each of which can talk to the rover twice a day. Source
The @MarsCuriosity Twitter account, written in the rover's own voice, is run by three women led by NASA social media manager Veronica McGregor. It started in November 2008 and has more than 137,000 followers. The rover's name came from 12-year-old Clara Ma, whose essay won a student contest in 2009 from more than 9,000 entries. Source
asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.Sysop_Kev wrote:sorting out their sleep schedules will be the easy bit.The operational schedule is hardly an afterthought. Those orbital communication passes determine whether commands can be sent and data retrieved at all. Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter each have only two brief windows per day to relay telemetry back to Earth. If an orbiter experiences an anomaly - as Odyssey did just three weeks ago with its reaction wheel - or if the uplink timing drifts, operations stall entirely.
asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.OffByOne wrote:That prolonged operational reality will determine the mission's ultimate return, not the euphoria of a single morning.It is quite true that the surface operations will demand a steady hand, but I see no harm in letting the boys have their pint if the machine touches down intact.
asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.asOf = this post's time. Later posts and news do not exist for this card.