Mars Fever: NASA's Curiosity Rover

[Polar Maritime]

This image taken by NASA’s Curiosity shows what lies ahead for the rover — its main science target, Mount Sharp. The rover’s shadow can be seen in the foreground, and the dark bands beyond are dunes. Rising up in the distance is the highest peak Mount Sharp at a height of about 3.4 miles (5.47km), taller than Mt. Whitney in California. The Curiosity team hopes to drive the rover to the mountain to investigate its lower layers, which scientists think hold clues to past environmental change.

This image was captured by the rover’s front left Hazard-Avoidance camera at full resolution shortly after it landed. It has been linearized to remove the distorted appearance that results from its fisheye lens. http://twistedsifter.com/2012/08/picture-of-the-day-curiosity-lands-on-mars/

[Coast]

Nasa's Curiosity rover has transmitted a low-resolution video showing the last 150 seconds of its dive through the Mars atmosphere, giving Earthlings a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world. As thumbnails of the video flashed on a big screen, scientists and engineers at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, let out "oohs" and "aahs".

The recording began with the protective heat shield falling away and ended with dust being kicked up as the rover was lowered by cables inside an ancient crater. It was a sneak preview since it will take some time before full-resolution frames are beamed back depending on other priorities. The full video "will just be exquisite", said Michael Malin, the chief scientist of the instrument.

Nasa celebrated the precision landing of a rover on Mars and marvelled over the mission's flurry of photographs - grainy black-and-white images of Martian gravel, a mountain at sunset and, most exciting of all, the spacecraft's white-knuckle plunge through the red planet's atmosphere. Curiosity, a roving laboratory the size of a compact car, landed right on target late on Sunday night after an eight-month, 352 million-mile journey.

It parked its six wheels about four miles from its ultimate science destination - Mount Sharp rising from the floor of Gale Crater near the equator. Extraordinary efforts were needed for the landing because the rover weighs one ton, and the thin Martian atmosphere offers little friction to slow a spacecraft down. Curiosity had to go from 13,000mph to zero in seven minutes, unfurling a parachute, then firing rockets to brake. In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered it to the ground at 2mph.

At the end of what Nasa called "seven minutes of terror", the vehicle settled into place almost perfectly flat in the crater it was aiming for. "We have ended one phase of the mission much to our enjoyment," mission manager Mike Watkins said. "But another part has just begun." The nuclear-powered Curiosity will dig into the Martian surface to analyse what is there and hunt for some of the molecular building blocks of life, including carbon.

It won't start moving for a couple of weeks, because all the systems on the 2.5 billion dollar rover have to be checked out. Colour photos and panoramas will start coming in the next few days. But first Nasa had to use tiny cameras designed to spot hazards in front of Curiosity's wheels. So early images of gravel and shadows abounded. The pictures were fuzzy, but scientists were delighted. The photos show "a new Mars we have never seen before", Mr Watkins said. "So every one of those pictures is the most beautiful picture I have ever seen."

In one of the photos from the close-to-the-ground hazard cameras, if you squinted and looked the right way, you could see "a silhouette of Mount Sharp in the setting sun", said an excited John Grotzinger, chief mission scientist from the California Institute of Technology. A high-resolution camera on the orbiting seven-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying 211 miles directly above the plummeting Curiosity, snapped a photo of the rover dangling from its parachute about a minute from touchdown. The parachute's design can be made out in the photo. "It's just mind-boggling to me," said Miguel San Martin, chief engineer for the landing team.

Curiosity is the heaviest piece of machinery Nasa has landed on Mars, and the success gave the space agency confidence that it can unload equipment that astronauts may need in a future manned trip to the red planet. The landing technique was hatched in 1999 in the wake of devastating back-to-back Mars spacecraft losses. Back then, engineers had no clue how to land super-heavy spacecraft. They brainstormed different possibilities, consulting Apollo-era engineers and pilots of heavy-lift helicopters.

"I think it's engineering at its finest. What engineers do is they make the impossible possible," said former Nasa chief technologist Bobby Braun. "This thing is elegant. People say it looks crazy. Each system was designed for a very specific function." Because of budget constraints, Nasa cancelled its joint US-European missions to Mars, scheduled for 2016 and 2018.

But if Curiosity finds something interesting, it could spur the public and Congress to provide more money for more Martian exploration.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mars-rover-curiosity-transmits-lowresolution-landing-video-8014660.html

[Coast]

First colour pictures coming through! (there is dust on the lens!)

http://www.dailymail...red-planet.html

http://youtu.be/Wby2JSyQSkU

[Polar Maritime]

Looks like we have found something already...... Maybe they can clean the lens.

Edited August 7, 2012 by Polar Maritime

[Polar Maritime]

Heads Up, Curiosity!

AUG 8

Posted by J. Major

Latest full-size image from Curiosity’s left navcam

This just in: the latest full-size image from Curiosity shows the rover’s shadow with its “head†extended…. hello, Curiosity!

The image above was taken with the rover’s left navcam, and also shows its branded plate and cool little Atari-esque “logoâ€. Awesome! You can see more raw images from Curiosity on the JPL site here.

http://lightsinthedark.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/heads-up-curiosity/

Edited August 8, 2012 by Polar Maritime

[Methuselah]

A pile of auld stanes!

[Coast]

The distant hills are part of the rim of Gale Crater. Note also the two dark circular patches in the foreground.

These are scour marks left by Curiosity’s rocket-powered descent crane

The Curiosity Mars rover has lifted its mast and used its high navigation cameras for the first time.

The robot vehicle has returned black and white images that capture part of its own body, its shadow on the ground and views off to the horizon. Spectacular relief - the rim cliffs of the crater in which the rover landed - can be seen in the distance.

Curiosity - also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, MSL - put down on the Red Planet on Monday (GMT).The US space agency (Nasa) mission came to rest on the floor of a deep depression on Mars' equator known as Gale Crater, close to a 5.5km-high mountain. The plan eventually is to take the robot to the base of this mountain where it is expected to find rocks that were laid down billions of years ago in the presence of liquid water. Curiosity will probe these sediments for evidence that past environments on Mars could once have favoured microbial life. Since its landing, engineers have been running through a list of health checks and equipment tests.

These have included deploying a high-gain antenna to provide a data link to Earth additional to the UHF satellite relays it uses most of the time. This antenna failed to point correctly at first, but the problem has now been fixed. The mast was stowed for the journey to Mars, lying flat on the deck of the rover. Raising it into the vertical was the main task of Sol 2 - the second full Martian day of surface operations..

Curiosity has two pairs of black and white, greyscale, navigation cameras which can acquire stereo imagery to help the rover pick a path across the surface. These Navcams sit just to the side of two science cameras - one wideangle, one telephoto. It is these Mastcams that will provide the really exquisite, true colour views of the Martian landscape. We should see something of their output following Sol 3. But the Navcam images are already providing a great deal of information. "You can see in the near-field the scour marks the descent engines made on the surface," noted Justin Maki, a curiosity imaging scientist. "Go all the way out to the horizon and you can see the north rim of Gale Crater. This image is fantastic, especially for all of us who've developed these cameras, and based on what we've done in the last 12 hours we've declared the Navcams commissioned and ready for use."

The thruster marks in the ground have certainly piqued the interest of Curiosity project scientist, John Grotzinger. "What's cool about this is that we got some free trenching," he said. We see our first glimpse of bedrock. Apparently there is a harder rockier material beneath this veneer of gravel and pebbles. So we're already getting a look into the subsurface."

He also remarked how Earth-like the vista appeared, joking: "You would really be forgiven for thinking that Nasa was trying to pull a fast one, and we actually put a rover out in the Mojave Desert and took a picture - a little Los Angeles smog coming in there." (He was referring to the haze over the distant cliffs) Most of the pictures we have seen so far have been low-resolution thumbnails - easy to downlink. But we are now starting to get one or two hi-res versions also. Mike Malin, the principal investigator on Mardi (Mars Descent Imager), has released a detailed view taken of the 4.5m-wide heatshield as it fell away from the rover's capsule during Monday's entry, descent and landing (EDL). "You've been hearing us say, 'just wait until you see the good stuff'. Well, this is the good stuff coming down, and it's quite spectacular," said Dr Malin. "You can actually see the stitching in the thermal blanket; there's wiring in there also for the [heatshield sensors]."

Eventually hundreds of Mardi pictures will be run together to make a movie of the descent. With the rover now on the ground and Mardi still pointing downwards, Dr Malin has also got a good shot of the gravel surface under the vehicle.One instrument on the rover has already had a chance to gather some data. This is the Radiation Assessment Detector (Rad). Indeed, this instrument has acquired quite a lot of data so far, as it was working for periods even during the rover's cruise to Mars. It is endeavouring to characterise the flux of high-energy atomic and subatomic particles reaching Mars from the Sun and distant exploded stars.

This radiation would be hazardous to any microbes alive on the planet today, but would also constitute a threat to the health of any future astronauts on the Red Planet. "We turned up on the 100th anniversary of Victor Hess's first measurements of galactic cosmic rays on Earth, which was quite appropriate," said Rad principal investigator Don Hassler. "We took about 3.5 hours of observations. Sometime next week we'll start taking routine measurements," he told BBC News.

In other news, Nasa reports it has now found more components of the landing system discarded by the rover during EDL. These are a set of six tungsten blocks that the rover's capsule ejected to shift its centre of mass and help guide its flight through the atmosphere. Satellite imagery has identified the line of craters these blocks made when they slammed into the ground about 12km from Curiosity's eventual landing position.

Nasa has also confirmed the precise timing of Monday's touchdown. The rover's computer put this at 05:17:57 UTC on Mars. With a one-way light-travel time of 13 minutes and 48 seconds to cover the 250 million km to Earth, this equates to a receive time here at mission control at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory of 05:31:45 UTC (GMT).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19186237

[Methuselah]

These are quite good:http://panoramas.dk/mars/greeley-haven.html

[Guest]

These are quite good:http://panoramas.dk/...eley-haven.html

That's good - the tracks indicate that the Rover has already done a little shuffle and are those true colours? Bit of a greenish tinge - copper?

[Polar Maritime]

These are quite good:http://panoramas.dk/mars/greeley-haven.html

Yes a good 360 shot there, but not from Curiosity.

[Polar Maritime]

[Polar Maritime]

[Polar Maritime]

Colorized image of Mount Sharp from Curiosity’s Navcam

Looking like an old photograph of a Western U.S. landscape, this is a view from Curiosity’s acquired on August 18 (UTC) with the rover’s right Navcam. I colored the image using some of Curiosity’s previous color shots for reference, and adjusted the curves quite a bit from theoriginal to bring out some contrast. The result resembles pinhole photography or lomography… Curiosity’s quite the hipster!
Named for Robert P. Sharp, the founder of modern planetary science, the mountain is the central peak of Gale Crater and rises 18,000 feet (5.5 km) from the floor of the crater. The exposed sedimentary layers along its flanks are the ultimate scientific goal for the MSL mission.
Curiosity won’t start actually driving toward Mt. Sharp until the end of the year, so until then we’ll have to be patient and enjoy the view!
See all the latest images from Curiosity here. http://lightsinthedark.wordpress.com/author/jaymajor/ Edited August 19, 2012 by Polar Maritime

[Polar Maritime]

[Polar Maritime]

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!".http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/19aug_curiosity3/

[Polar Maritime]

Curiosity’s Sundial Carries a Message of Hope

A recent high-definition image from Curiosity’s Mastcam shows the rover’s sundial (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/96930/curiositys-sundial-carries-a-message-of-hope/#ixzz24FvTyzgd

While Curiosity is definitely loaded up with some of the most high-tech instruments ever made to investigate the surface of Mars, it also carries a very low-tech instrument: a sundial, which can be used to determine the position of the Sun in the sky and the season on Mars just like they do here on Earth. Curiosity’s sundial also has additional color calibration tools for the rover’s Mastcam, which captured the image above on August 19 — the 13th “Sol†of the mission.

The connection between a device invented by people thousands of years ago being in use today on a robotic explorer on another planet didn’t go unnoticed by the Mars Exploration Rover team either; in addition to the words “Mars 2012″ and “To Mars, To Explore†around its top bezel, Curiosity’s sundial also carries a message of history, hope and inspiration printed along its edges…

Along with line drawings and the word for “Mars†in sixteen languages, Curiosity’s sundial bears the following inscription:

“For millennia, Mars has stimulated our imaginations. First, we saw Mars as a wandering star, a bringer of war from the abode of the gods. In recent centuries, the planet’s changing appearance in telescopes caused us to think that Mars had a climate like the Earth’s. Our first space age views revealed only a cratered, Moon-like world, but later missions showed that Mars once had abundant liquid water. Through it all, we have wondered: Has there been life on Mars? To those taking the next steps to find out, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery.â€

Curiosity’s successful landing on Mars at 10:31 p.m. on August 5, 2012 (PDT) was only the first (although very exciting!) step of its mission, and the first of hopefully many next steps to explore our neighboring world. Perhaps one day this message will be revisited by human explorers on Mars who may then reflect back on how it all began, and all of the innovations, hope and — well, curiosity — that made each of their rust-dusted steps possible.

Follow the sun, Curiosity!

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/96930/curiositys-sundial-carries-a-message-of-hope/#ixzz24FvcnHle

[Crepuscular Ray]

Sweet: they've called the site Bradbury Landing. I hope Curiosity fares better than the humans in the Martian Chronicles!

[Coast]

The US space agency's (Nasa) Curiosity rover has finally begun to roll.

The Mars robot, which landed on the Red Planet two weeks ago, turned its six wheels briefly on Wednesday to satisfy engineers that its locomotion system was in full working order. Curiosity is a sophisticated mobile science laboratory. It has been built to drive at least 20km across the Martian landscape to investigate whether the planet ever had the conditions necessary for life. Wednesday's drive saw the rover roll forward 4.5m, turn clockwise on the spot for about 120 degrees, and then reverse up 2.5m.

It took about five minutes to complete the manoeuvre. Another 10 minutes or so was spent taking pictures of the outcome, recording the vehicle's historic first tracks in the Martian soil. Nasa's lead rover driver Matt Heverly: "Today Curiosity had her first successful drive on Mars" looking at those images, which have been stitched together to make the mosaic featured on this page, it is clear now that Curiosity's rear-right wheel landed on top of a rock estimated to be some 9cm tall.The vehicle will cover a lot of ground on this mission but the significance of the first roll manoeuvre could not be overstated, said Curiosity project manager Pete Theisinger.

"It couldn't be more important. We built a rover and unless the rover roves, we really haven't accomplished anything," he told reporters. "And the fact that we completely exercised it and everything was on track is a big moment." Nasa has made one other key announcement on what has been the 16th day of this mission. It has named the spot on which the robot landed after the science fiction author Ray Bradbury. The celebrated American writer, who died in June, was an enthusiastic supporter of the space agency.

"His books have truly inspired us," said Michael Meyer, the lead scientist on Nasa's Mars exploration programme. "The Martian Chronicles have inspired our curiosity and opened our minds to the possibility of life on Mars. "In his honour, we declare the place that Curiosity touched down to be forever known as Bradbury Landing."

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-19342994

[Hairy Celt]

Excellent latest slightly hi-res image from NASA this morning. A geomorphologist's comments would be interesting just now! I think I can see tilted strata, signs of a (recent?) streambed, and lots of wind erosion - but the erosion seems to vary from place to place...

[Polar Maritime]

Latest picture.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

This photo from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows the layered geologic history of the base of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-high mountain rising from the center of Gale Crater. The foreground terrain rises to a crest about 755 feet (230 meters) away from the rover.

[Hairy Celt]

http://www.nivnac.co.uk/mer/index.php

Is worth a look!!

I can't get a 2nd link to work but there's a paper referenced on the Wikipedia Mars entry which describes tectonic activity on Mars. The reversed tilted strata shown in yesterday's new hi-res photos would suggest this is widespread.

Edit: the link is buried in the 'I' at the start of the previous paragraph. Eeech.

Edited August 28, 2012 by Hairy Celt

[Guest]

Latest picture.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

This photo from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows the layered geologic history of the base of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-high mountain rising from the center of Gale Crater. The foreground terrain rises to a crest about 755 feet (230 meters) away from the rover.

I thought I could see some snowdrops growing there

[Polar Maritime]

A picture of a camera... on Mars

The left eye of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity took this image of the camera on the rover's arm, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), during the 30th Martian day, or sol, of the rove

r's mission on Mars (Sept. 5, 2012). MAHLI is one of the tools on a turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm. When this image was taken, the arm had raised the turret to about the same height as the camera on the mast. The Mastcam's left eye has a 34-millimeter focal length lens.

The image shows that MAHLI has a thin film or coating of Martian dust on it. This dust accumulated during Curiosity's final descent to the Martian surface, as the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft's descent stage (or sky crane) engines were disrupting the surface nearby.

The reddish circle near the center of the Mastcam Sol 30 image is the window of MAHLI's dust cover, with a diameter a little less than a soda can's diameter. Inside the lens, each of the nine glass lens elements and the front sapphire window are bonded or cemented in place by a red-colored silicone RTV (room temperature vulcanizing) material. This is a space-qualified "glue" that holds the lens elements in place. When the MAHLI is viewed from certain angles, this material gives one the impression that the inside of the lens is red.

The mechanism at the right in this image is Curiosity's dust removal tool, a motorized wire brush.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

[Polar Maritime]

09.09.2012 First Image From Curiosity's Arm Camera With Dust Cover Open The reclosable dust cover on Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) was opened for the first time during the 33rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 8, 2012), enabling MAHLI to take this image.

The level of detail apparent in the image shows that haziness in earlier MAHLI images since landing was due to dust that had settled on the dust cover during the landing.

The patch of ground shown is about 34 inches (86 centimeters) across. The size of the largest pebble, near the bottom of the image, is about 3 inches (8 centimeters). Notice that the ground immediately around that pebble has less dust visible (more gravel exposed) than in other parts of the image. The presence of the pebble may have affected the wind in a way that preferentially removes dust from the surface around it.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

[Methuselah]

Have they planted grass seed, PM?