Rover soon to send even more amazing video, photos of Mars
Source: Agencies |
August 9, 2012, Thursday
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NASA has received a flood of new black-and-white images from the Curiosity rover on Mars that it will stitch together to make a panorama.
The photos began pouring in yesterday after the nuclear-powered rover raised its camera-equipped mast. The raw images reveal the rover's shadow on the ground and the Martian horizon.
Curiosity touched down Sunday, parking itself inside an ancient crater, but the best views - of Mars and the journey there - are yet to come.
Curiosity is giving scientists an unprecedented sense of what it took to reach its Martian destination. The roving laboratory sent back nearly 300 thumbnails that NASA processed into a low-quality video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the thin Martian atmosphere.
In the video, the protective heat shield pops off and tumbles away. The footage gets jumpy as Curiosity rides on a parachute. In the last scene, dust billows up just before landing.
The full high-resolution video will be downloaded when time allows and should give the first peek of a landing on another planet.
NASA twice tried to record a Mars landing. In 1999, the Mars Polar Lander carried similar gear, but it slammed into the south pole after prematurely shutting off its engines. Another effort was aborted in 2008 during the Phoenix lander's mission to the northern plains when mission managers decided not to turn it on for fear it would interfere with the landing.
"It's too emotional for me," said Ken Edgett of the Malin Space Science Systems, which operates the video camera. "It's been a long journey and it's really awesome."
Curiosity's journey to Mars spanned eight months and 566 million kilometers. The size of a compact car, it was too heavy to land using air bags. Instead, it relied on the heat shield, parachute, rockets and cables to lower it to the ground.
During its seven-minute plunge through the atmosphere, Curiosity shed the spacecraft parts. On Tuesday, scientists got their first view of the castoffs. The eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had circled over the landing site and spotted Curiosity and the scattered parts.
"It's like a crime scene photo," said Sarah Milkovich, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist.
The parachute appeared to be inflated, and the rocket stage that unspooled the cables crashed 640 meters away.
The nuclear-powered, six-wheel Curiosity will spend the next two years chiseling into rocks and scooping up soil at Gale Crater to determine whether the environment ever had the right conditions for microbes to thrive. It will spend a chunk of its time driving to Mount Sharp where images from space reveal signs of past water on the lower flanks.
It'll be several weeks before it takes its first drive and flexes its robotic arm.
The photos began pouring in yesterday after the nuclear-powered rover raised its camera-equipped mast. The raw images reveal the rover's shadow on the ground and the Martian horizon.
Curiosity touched down Sunday, parking itself inside an ancient crater, but the best views - of Mars and the journey there - are yet to come.
Curiosity is giving scientists an unprecedented sense of what it took to reach its Martian destination. The roving laboratory sent back nearly 300 thumbnails that NASA processed into a low-quality video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the thin Martian atmosphere.
In the video, the protective heat shield pops off and tumbles away. The footage gets jumpy as Curiosity rides on a parachute. In the last scene, dust billows up just before landing.
The full high-resolution video will be downloaded when time allows and should give the first peek of a landing on another planet.
NASA twice tried to record a Mars landing. In 1999, the Mars Polar Lander carried similar gear, but it slammed into the south pole after prematurely shutting off its engines. Another effort was aborted in 2008 during the Phoenix lander's mission to the northern plains when mission managers decided not to turn it on for fear it would interfere with the landing.
"It's too emotional for me," said Ken Edgett of the Malin Space Science Systems, which operates the video camera. "It's been a long journey and it's really awesome."
Curiosity's journey to Mars spanned eight months and 566 million kilometers. The size of a compact car, it was too heavy to land using air bags. Instead, it relied on the heat shield, parachute, rockets and cables to lower it to the ground.
During its seven-minute plunge through the atmosphere, Curiosity shed the spacecraft parts. On Tuesday, scientists got their first view of the castoffs. The eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had circled over the landing site and spotted Curiosity and the scattered parts.
"It's like a crime scene photo," said Sarah Milkovich, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist.
The parachute appeared to be inflated, and the rocket stage that unspooled the cables crashed 640 meters away.
The nuclear-powered, six-wheel Curiosity will spend the next two years chiseling into rocks and scooping up soil at Gale Crater to determine whether the environment ever had the right conditions for microbes to thrive. It will spend a chunk of its time driving to Mount Sharp where images from space reveal signs of past water on the lower flanks.
It'll be several weeks before it takes its first drive and flexes its robotic arm.
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