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Curiosity Lands On Mars
The Mars Science Laboratory, a.k.a. Curiosity, is now less than an hour from touchdown on Mars. It's scheduled to land at 1:31 AM EDT (0531 UTC). The landing will be monitored by the Odyssey orbiter, which will be the data relay between Curiosity and Earth. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be listening to Curiosity as well (yes — two of our probes orbiting another world will be watching a third). While Odyssey will be giving us close to real-time updates (as close as possible, given the 14-minute time delay), MRO's data will take a bit longer to be processed and evaluated. NASA is broadcasting from the JPL mission room right now. If you'd like to watch a pretty awesome graphical visualization of the mission, check out eyes.nasa.gov. If you'd like to play around with a Java app showing Mars-local times and seasons, check out Mars24. If you'd like to watch unofficial coverage, Bad Astronomer Phil Plait and a bunch of other astronomers are hosting a public Google Hangout. If you'd like to read a detailed explanation of the landing, checkout NASA's press kit (PDF), and there's also a post about what to expect when the rover starts sending pictures back to Earth, which will be about two hours after the rover lands. Good luck to everyone involved! We'll update this post when we get word on the landing.
Update: 08/06 05:33 GMT by S : Curiosity is on the ground! Everything looks nominal, and everybody at JPL is cheering. Congratulations, folks. They're continuing to receive telemetry from Odyssey, and the connection is strong. They've now received the first images back from Mars of Curiosity on the ground. A press briefing is scheduled in a little bit (2:15AM EDT, 0615 UTC), and several more throughout the day as more data comes back.
Update: 08/06 05:33 GMT by S : Curiosity is on the ground! Everything looks nominal, and everybody at JPL is cheering. Congratulations, folks. They're continuing to receive telemetry from Odyssey, and the connection is strong. They've now received the first images back from Mars of Curiosity on the ground. A press briefing is scheduled in a little bit (2:15AM EDT, 0615 UTC), and several more throughout the day as more data comes back.
Richard C. Hoagland will be on describing the Martian civilization that NASA is hiding from us.
The best-quality streaming video of the event from JPL that I've found is over at Ustream.
FYI, FWIW, HTH.
Kid-proof tablet..
Check out http://eyes.nasa.gov/
From the page:
""Eyes on the Solar System" is a 3-D environment full of real NASA mission data. Explore the cosmos from your computer. Hop on an asteroid. Fly with NASA's Voyager spacecraft. See the entire solar system moving in real time. It's up to you. You control space and time."
and
"Eyes on the Solar System lets you ride with Curiosity all the way to the surface of Gale crater. Preview the events of Entry Descent and Landing, or watch live!"
As many as it takes until we know what happens to this awesome nuclear powered rover with frikin lasers on another frikin planet!
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
It's scheduled to land at 1:31 AM EST
EDT!
Great writeup with the links.
Let's go, Curiosity! You the Rover! :-)
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"Relative to whose frame of reference, blueworlder?"
The Council of Elders has confirmed the interception and destruction of the latest mechanized terror from the blue world.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thus:
When a junior combat reporter pointed out that the link between the carrier vessel and the mechanized invader may have been designed to be broken at the moment of landing, that the actual threat was the so-called "power source" and not the flying invader, and suggested that if the Martian Defense Force had just waited just a few seconds longer, the squibs holding the skyhook to the skycrane might have failed, resulting in the carrier vessel crashing down upon the invader, thereby destroying both, K'Breel had the combat reporter's gelsacs placed directly in front of the dormant invader's photonic weapons.
"If the blue-shirted denizens of the blue world seek evidence of organic matter so strongly," mused K'Breel, "then let them have their fill of it!"
(Because the Council must to draft at least two of these press releases with every new phase of the battle, the Speaker would like to thank the infiltrators at the Martian Cyberdefense Detachment (unit 216.34.181.48) for remaining as glued to the screen over the past fifteen units of time as everybeing on the Council was.)
Curiosity is ON THE SURFACE.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
AFRAID NOT! Touchdown Confirmed!!
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Suck it, jackass.
That sounds great! But where is her boyfriend?
Well nice knowing you guys. Life as we know it ends once that clears around Mars.
Congradulation NASA! I hope they increase your funding and reduce funding for wars.
God spoke to me
And the gold medal for the all-species 350M KM space landing goes to NASA, who scored a perfect 10 for landing on the surface of Mars!
Congratulations to NASA and the JPL. Dare Mighty Things indeed.
Surprise, surprise, actual scientists and engineers are better than you at this stuff.
I'm absolutely amazed that doing something like this is even possible. All of the people who put this together are heroes to me. Fuck yes. This is awesome.
I don't respond to AC's.
inorite? Because we land car-sized nuclear-powered portable science laboratories on other planets all the fucking time, right dude?
"News for Nerds, stuff that matters" - This qualifies as both. And we'll probably have a nonstop stream of Curiosity FPs over the next few days. Suck it up or find another site, because as much as I hate to sound exclusionary, it sounds like you jus' don't belong here.
Huge thanks to NASA/JPL for pulling this thing off, and letting everyone be a part of it.
I was watching a live simulation of the thing full-screen on one monitor (eyes.nasa.gov), and watching/hearing commentary on Nasa TV on another. It was very thrilling.
As a geek, foremost I find myself going WOW> HOLY !!! WE JUST LANDED A WINNEBEGO [ok, it's a bit smaller than the average Winny] ON MARS!!!
But I also find myself impressed that the Ustream link I posted (above) had something like 230k viewers at peak, and despite the load it never missed a beat for me. The simulation appeared to be happening in with very low-latency, and provided spectacular imagery.
Politically, if these methods of passive involvement were more widely publicized, funding the space program would be a no-brainer for any American -- just for the excitement involved, if nothing else, of accomplishing such a difficult task.
Wish I could link to the first photos (there seem to be two of them), but they don't seem to be officially posted just yet....
Kid-proof tablet..
Wow, I feel like I haven't felt in a long time. I feel proud to be an American.
Kudos to NASA, and a big "fuck you" to Congress for cutting their funding.
With any luck, these excellent news from the science world will push back the barrage of useless "events" from the olympics marketing machine.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Don't know if trolling or just doesn't understand the kind of bandwidth you don't get during a complicated high-speed descent that ends on the far side of another planet. Why don't you just call up AT&T and get them to install DSL on the rover? Or maybe you can crank your wifi router up to get a better signal.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I was watching the broadcast live, very exciting indeed. The description of the events sounded like it was real-time when in fact there is a delay, however they react and comment based on the transmission they received, I did head something curious "we would steer Curiosity if ..." which is impossible, they can't steer, curiosity steers itself mainly because of the delay.
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The first encounter with alien life has not gone well. A catlike alien has been squashed and killed by Curiosity.
Sky crane for the win. I had images in my head of hovering Eagles from Space 1999. :-)
I was just thinking how awesome it was watching NASA TV compared to NBC Olympic footage, and then she goes and pulls a Costas, pulling away just as they were reading out some cool technical details.
REALLY annoying. If I'm watching NASA TV let me in on all the technical details possible please!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, how many "Curiosity is About To Land" articles do we need today?
You might want to turn in your nerd badge and remove slashdot from your bookmarks. Try www.disney.com instead.
No sig today...
We are not alone
Kudos to the folks at NASA and JPL for a job well done. Hopefully we'll get some great science out of it.
All of this just shows what a huge mistake was made in cutting the budget for planetary science and future Mars missions. Tonight, NASA did everything that they are supposed to do. They pushed us further out into the solar system, giving us the most detailed view yet of another world. They pushed scientific boundaries, sending an entire laboratory to another planet to look for extraterrestrial life. They pushed the limits of engineering. And they showed the world what we look like at our best- an America that is innovative, pioneering, and willing to take risks.
Times are tough, but of all the things to cut from the budget, why cut planetary missions? The cuts mean that we don't have anything in the works; we've got Curiosity but we have no plans to follow up. I find myself deeply disappointed that the White House would do something so short-sighted. The thing is, what happened tonight was genuinely inspiring. I felt truly proud of what my country had done. And I tried to remember the last time I had felt like that, and then it hit me. It was when Obama was elected.
There's more than a little irony to that.
Seriously, I think we need more. This is great news. Much better then bloodshed etc. Isn't it nice to get some good news for a change?
Since I'm from Europe I'd like to add: Kudos to the people of the US for funding it!
That was the first low res thumbnail through the yet to be jettisoned lens caps. Have to wait for the dust to settle.
Sad that you say so much, with so little behind it. When we first started landing rovers on the moon, it was in preparation for landing man on the moon. Because the moon has no atmosphere, the landers come in SLOW and it is 1/6 G, it made it fairly simple on how to land. Mars is different. We have to arrive a great deal faster, we have an atmosphere to deal with, and 1/3 G. As such, there are MANY more issues to landing there. This was actually, one of the most difficult landings done on a planet since the early days. We could only test parts of it. No way to fully test it.
BUT, from here on out, we will see larger payloads going to mars. In fact, the next American one might be red dragon. That would double the amount of science on Mars. The same craft can be used on the moon to land cargo AND humans.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Kudos to Xbox live. They had a special event app to stream the event live. All the drama. Computer sims based on live telemetry. All in HD on the big screen. Pretty sweet.
ALL the articles!
It's a Wil Wheaton-ism.
Message from Curiosity: Landed safely. Initiating primary directive - kill cats.
“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.”
Carl Sagan,
Congratulations NASA and JPL! I hope you continue to inspire us all to dare mighty things!
It's obvious that god put it on Mars, then.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Well, yeah. That's what unix nerds tend to use for their mobile devices. Apple laptops are easily the most popular laptops I've ever seen among us engineering types at Sun and Oracle in the last decade.
No, because we're still busy spending seven trillion dollars to bailout financial institutions while simultaneously pissing ourselves over the "massive" NASA budget for trivial shit like furthering the reach of all fucking human-kind.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers. NASA jsut got its budget cut too, can you blame them for tooting the 'Made in America' horn?
Good-bye
Kudos to the people of the US for funding it!
While we're exchanging acknowledgements, my heartfelt gratitude goes to the EU for their efforts in compelling the world to standardize on micro-USB for cell phone power and data.
Offtopic, I know, but very much appreciated :-)
But is Pu-238 the only nuclear fuel source we could use?
Wiki says there are about 30 radioisotopes that could be used for this purpose, and both the US and Russians have used very small scale reactors (not just thermo-electric) on space vehicles in the past. The russians have 30 fission reactors in space on RORSATs.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
idiot.
Go educate yourself. It has 17 cameras.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I think Obama said we were supposed to be working towards putting people on Mars. I get confused... I think Bush v2 said the moon.
But give it 5 years, the plan will change. We spend so much time dicking around with the $33 per person, per year, we spend on NASA... it seems crazy. I mean, we each spend thousands of dollars per year on our military. Like, work for a month or so only to donate it all to the DoD. And they spend it on a handful of multi-billion-dollar models of planes that still don't work, while sending kids out to get blown up with no armor, short-changing veterans on medical services and such... always complaining about budget constraints while nobody important ever seems to question how they spent their money. By comparison, NASA is a fantastic bargain.
Watching the NASA feed I was so glad to get a virtual boner from the fact there wasnt a single toy system in the room. I was so glad to see Sun, MACs and Linux systems fully represented.
No IBM ??
No Cray?
o0
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Kudos to the people of US who have founded it one way or another. And certainly kudos to NASA folk who took that money and made it work.
Overall picture is not so nice, however. Here are some costs for comparison:
MSL Project (which yielded Curiosity): $2.5 billion
London Olympics 2012: $14.5 billion (public expenses for venues, security etc only, doesn't include the cost of the events themselves - that's paid by private sponsors)
A single month of war in Afghanistan (as of 2011): $6.7 billion
Total cost of the war to date: $470 billion !!!
Yup, the US alone could land two rovers per month if it stopped chasing mujis and camels in Afghanistan! But, hey, at least they land something? EU is, on the paper at least, a bigger economy. Think about what US and EU could accomplish together if they stopped squandering money on stupid things.
For Europa we need to drill through 20 km of ice. We can do 4km in 10 years (like Lake Vostok). But 20 km autonomously. Not in the near future. And where do we drill. We learnt from Viking not to be too ambitious. And I think your fantasy is getting mixed up with your reality. Also we go to Mars because it's the best chance to find life. They are only rocks to you because you never bothered to actually *look* at what is there.
It's nauseating for a people to be proud of their accomplishments? What sort of fucked-up culture do you live in where this is the case? Seriously.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Since I'm from Europe I'd like to add: Kudos to the people of the US for funding it!
And a special thanks for sticking with the metric system this time.
Here's the reasoning for that: From the point of view of the people controlling their budget, NASA's raison-d'etre is public relations for the United States. That science stuff is just a concession to all those eggheads who want to actually learn about stuff.
I am officially gone from
Hope so too. But still, there is nothing more nauseating than American Nationalism oozing out of every statement on the mission success. It's worse than the Chinese - and that takes some doing.
Listen, America has done plenty of things that we should be ashamed of. When you're blindly supporting the country through things like unjust wars and human rights abuses, that's nationalism. But sometimes the country does something genuinely right, something true to the values of the nation. Like the guys at NASA did tonight. I think we've earned the right to take a brief break from worrying about how screwed up things are with the country economically, politically, and militarily, and feel a little pride about doing something something that's genuinely amazing. So please f*** off.
If the translation is of the same quality Google Translate usually produces, your girlfriend is wondering why the US is invading the Red Sea with an autonomous sorcery platform.
What about the poor Martian this US colonizing robot landed on eh? And the sky crane carelessly thrown away? Flattened a Martian orphanage but I bet the US press won't be reporting on THAT!
Why doesn't NASA release a statement they are going to stop killing Martians in their stellar conquest?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, war is an ugly thing. But not the ugliest of things. The degraded state of moral decay wherein nothing seems worth war is far worse (with apologies to John Stuart Mill.) Tell me, what do you think drove the technological advancements that got Curiosity to Mars? Here's a hint: It was an ugly thing -- war. Humans are an aggressive species -- we didn't make it to the top of the food chain on this planet by being pacifists. Instead of lamenting the cost of war, we should be celebrating the fact that as aggressive as we are (and always will be as long as we remain human!) we can still channel some of that aggression constructively.
US and Russians have used very small scale reactors (not just thermo-electric) on space vehicles in the past.
True, though the thermoelectric reactors are very simple by comparison. Naturally, they have no moving parts and are completely stable. Of course, they're rather less efficient, but the rover needs a lot of heat to stay warm anyway, so that doesn't matter too much.
Given the rigours of take-off and landing, and the penalty for anything going wrong (LEO satellites can be replaced much more easily), theremo electric does seem like a really good choice.
I think that Pu-238 is probably about the best fuel source too, given the power density and decay chain being strong in alpha emitters.
The latter also applies to reactors: you don't want a really powerful radiation source next to lots of sensitive instruments if at all possible.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The big question on everybody's mind, though... did they finally send a lander equipped with at least one camera designed to capture images in true human color? Previous landers had cameras equipped with RGB filters, but the filters were optimized for scientific analysis instead of accurate color rendition, and deviated significantly from the filters you'd use to capture monochrome images through red, green, and blue filters for producing accurate color photos as a human would see them.
Put another way, the red, green, and blue filters used by NASA were very different from the red, green, and blue filters used by Technicolor & similar film processes years ago. They're all narrower in the range of colors they pass, and the red filter in particular is centered much closer to near-infrared than a photographic "red" filter used for accurate photography would be. The net result is that the color images reconstructed by combining the three image channels look kind of like the color you see at a nightclub when something is illuminated by only red, green, and blue LED stage lights (or really low-CRI cheap fluorescent light bulbs) -- they have red, green, and blue components... but they're wrong, or at least incomplete.
NASA spent years babbling about the ambiguities of human vision & context-sensitive calibration before someone finally called them out and demanded to know why their camera gear couldn't do auto white-balance, auto color-calibration, and gamma correction the way any halfway decent USB webcam has been able to do for more than a decade.
NASA finally admitted sometime around 2006 that producing color photos that were color-accurate -- as well as high-res and pretty -- somehow never made it into the official specs, and yeah, it WAS kind of an oversight, and one they'd work on correcting for future missions.The question is, did this lander get spec'ed, built, and launched before that point, or were they able to slip an additional camera on board that's basically a radiation-hardened version of what you'd find in a decent $100 CCD color webcam, with auto-exposure & auto white-balance, so they can at least grab some photos and send them back for color reference purposes?
All these worlds are yours except Europa.
Attempt no landing there.
Your entire post is so ignorant as to how high bandwidth broadcasting works that one would have to start from the basics.
Um, the moon is close, really close as in compared to mars. It takes a whole lot less power to send a signal back to earth.
The moon is close, you don't have to aim your signal so well to hit earth. Your antenna size is smaller.
No direct line of sight to earth. It's on the far side of the planet to us. Any live signal would have to be transmitted via the MRO, if it's in line of sight at the time.
Re-entry blackout. The moon has no atmosphere, mars does.
Weight, landing on an atmosphereless, low gravity moon is a lot easier then landing on mars, rather then all the complicated heavy shit for landing cameras, save the payload for 'once we've successfully landed' science missions.
Here is my take on that -- for whatever reason, the Americans have put this device on Mars (and have a functioning orbiter around Saturn, and have a spacecraft headed toward Pluto, etc.). No other nation or group of nations has done it or done planetary exploration on the scale of the Americans -- specifically I am calling out the EU and Japan on this item, both of which have huge economies and the technological prowess to do it, but choose not to (though the EU might be coming around, a bit). Only the Americans have spent the money to do it; who knows what all their motivations (our motivations, I'm American) might be? If part of it is overtly displayed nationalism then I will accept that as part of the deal to get the missions. I will be fully supportive of any other nation which does the same thing.
Yeah, why not view it as stimulus money. After all, it all gets spent on Earth, and almost all in the USA.
White balance is done in post-processing anyway, there's nothing physically in a camera (apart from bits of the firmware in some FLASH cells somewhere) that has anything to do with it. Exposure control is done in firmware as well, by taking short, high-noise samples from the image sensor to figure out how much light is coming in. On Mars that's not a big deal as you don't really have any fast changes -- there are no clouds. When a dust storm comes in, it's a gradual change and can be accommodated just by taking high-resolution, longer-exposure pictures and noticing a trend in brightness.
I would tend to agree about the color filters, although I'd also like to how how do the transmission spectra of the filters used on modern CMOS camera imagers for terrerstrial use look? And how do they compare in Q or 50% bandwidth with whatever's on Curiosity's filter wheel(s)?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.