Curious about Curiosity - Page 4

Perhaps they are talking about the drill being '''clean''
dx,posted about this a month (or longer) ago.

All is well.(I Hope and Pray)

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Comment::
Nice Link.
John

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2012/pdf/2864.pdf

Subsurface reflections at the Gale landing ellipse were detected by the SHARAD radar instrument on the MRO orbiter. The landing area is also at a very low elevation, 3km below the "datum" (the Mars equivalent of "sea level"). Possibility of ground ice?

MSL better be prepared for a rough landing---the radar indicates the surface is rougher than all the previous landing sites on Mars.

The mountain at Gale Crater is named Mount Sharp.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-090

...this is a controlled vertical drop c/w visuals directed at the ground...I see no problem with a clean landing.

yt
dx

That Sky Crane is going to scare the hell out all of us! Gale was chosen partly because because of the landing elipse and there is margin for error. Thankfully we are far more precise at navigating to the planet, we just need to hope the upper atmosphere high speed winds are not in a bad mood!

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A summary of Mars Society talks, including this one:

Michel Cabane, from LATMOS, co-principal investigator of SAM (i.e: Sample Analysis at Mars), one of the main instruments of the mission aboard the MSL rover Curiosity, the new exploration mission to be launched in November 2011, has developed the theme of the search for organic molecules on Mars. He explained how organic materials can be destroyed by hydrogen peroxide and perchlorate on the surface of Mars and described the SAM equipment which makes 50 percent of the mass of the 75 kg of scientific instruments aboard Curiosity. Its sensitivity is such that a single bacterium can be detected. SAM is therefore expected to clarify the surprising results obtained by the Viking instruments in the 1970s.

There are also abstracts of the talks:

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A short blurb about the mission.

7 minutes of terror! NASA video on what it will be like putting Curiosity on the surface of Mars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzqdoXwLBT8

Curiosity has made a few minor adjustments to its trajectory and mission controllers are confident they are bang on track as they enter the "approach phase". The landing elipse has been greatly reduced and they hope to put the one ton rover down very close to Sharp Mountain so as to save a couple of months traversing to the primary target.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-188

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NASA news conference today about the MSL landing, including video of the entire news conference.

@Kevin #69

You have to watch from 4:14 in that youtube. The narrator says something about lowering the rover at a 20 meter long distance with a 21 feet line. Serious. They lost a mission on the metric and imperial difference once, that should be enough.

Aside from tat remark, beautifull video and fantastic engineering.

For the people with an xbox

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Mars-Rover-Landing/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258480836

zoost, My guess is that yes, the lines are 6.4 meters long and that the skycrane stops and hovers at 30 meters, lowers MSL the full length of the lines and then slowly descends until the rover touches the ground - and then severs the lines and then flies away and then the fun begins.

What scares me the most is 500,000 lines of unproven code for EDL. "BLE Abort". Oops. Should have been BGE.

From Kevin:

Still cannot post from work computer but I lurk instead but here a few answers to the debate that has been going on regarding Odyssey:

Nasa may miss Curiosity Mars rover's landing signal.

Mars Rover Driver posted on Twitter yesterday that there is not expected to be any comms or drive until Wed eve.

Hope all is well with you.

Best regards,


Kevin

I find the fact that Curiosity has a laser "zapper" quite intriguing.

I wonder whether a zap from the laser at night could be detected by an orbiting satellite?

If so, it might be possible to extract from the signal interesting information about particular paths through the atmosphere, or it could perhaps serve as a last-ditch communication method.

Wish we had a wind sock like Pheonix and an
audio system...can't have everything I guess.

I for one will be PRAYING for a safe landing.
jd.

#77 MSL has the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station:

Information about wind, temperatures and humidity
comes from electronic sensors on two finger-like booms
extending horizontally from partway up the main vertical
mast holding the ChemCam laser and the Mastcam.
Each of the booms holds a sensor for recording air temperature
and three sensors for detecting air movement
in three dimensions. Placement of the booms at an
angle of 120 degrees from each other enables calculating
the velocity even when the main mast is blocking the
wind from one direction. The boom pointing toward the
front of the rover, Boom 2, also holds the humidity sensor
inside a downward-tilted protective cylinder. Boom
1, pointing to the side and slightly toward the rear, holds
an infrared sensor for measuring ground temperature

A very informative,interesting link.

http://techland.time.com/2012/07/16/mission-to-mars-8-amazing-tech-tools-aboard-nasas-curiosity-rover/

The very first post on this thread has a link to a 60 page document detailing everything about Curiosity. If this baby can make touch down there will be some fantastic science coming our way!