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Showing posts with label Mars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mars. Show all posts
Friday, August 17, 2012
Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Was the Mars Landing Worth It?
Was the Mars Landing Worth It?
We are under attack by terrorists every day, almost 1 out of every 10 people in our country is unemployed and we can't balance the budget, but we could afford to send a rover to Mars.
The $2.6 billion dollar price tag to send the remote controlled vehicle to Mars will collect data and send it back... data that won't really do much other than help cover our sci-fi curiosity for a bit...
Why are we exploring Mars? We won't ever live there, there aren't martians (sorry if you think there are...I think they would have found us by now), and we aren't going to find out anything exciting from that planet.
We have so many issues here in America to take care of. Why don't we just let those billionaires waste their money mining asteroids like they said they were going to do a couple months ago and be fine with that?
Think about all the good that that $2.6 billion could have done for the people of this nation... what a waste!
Disagree with me? Let me know!
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Watch NASA's live coverage of Mars rover landing
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 final stage of Curiosity's descent to the surface of Mars will involve being slung on tethers below the spacecraft's landing stage.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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:
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.
But first, Curiosity has to survive its landing. Much larger than earlier Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity -- the 1-ton machine is roughly the size of a very small car -- Curiosity posed a significant challenge to the engineers tasked with getting it down through the Martian atmosphere and onto the soil of the Red Planet.
At an altitude of about 7 miles, and about 7 minutes from the surface, a parachute will deploy to slow the spaceship's cruise stage from 13,200 miles per hour, first to 900 mph and eventually to 180 mph. About a mile above the surface, the rocket-powered landing stage will take over, slowing things further to the walking-speed rate of 2 mph. At the very modest altitude of 66 feet, the rover will finally separate out, and this is where things get most interesting -- Curiosity will be lowered the rest of the way to the surface on a bridle slung on three nylon tethers below the descent stage, with an umbilical providing a power and communication connection.
In the final few minutes, a high-definition camera will begin recording video. "It does eight frames per second, high-definition-quality video from the backshell coming off [all the way] to the ground," said project manager Pete Theisinger. "So it's a lot of data, it'll take a long time to get it back. But it should be a tremendous movie when it does."
Bill Harwood of CNET and CBSNews.com contributed to this report.
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