** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

PermaBanned

PermaBanned

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In space flight, only one thing is certain: no matter the result, it always looks cool!

How the DIY Space Capsule Test Could Fail

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mrk

mrk

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Cartier-Bresson coined the "Decisive Moment" in 1952 with his book. To put it into a cosmic perspective, NASA's Curiosity snapped a photo of what appears to be it's crane-craft that (by design) crash landed 2000 feet in the distance.

It just so happened that Curiosity had pointed one of its cameras in that direction and had managed to take a photo (1/200sec) just at the very moment the crane crashed into the Martian surface.

Even more impressive is that none of this was under control from anyone on Earth, the rover is on its own here.

If that's not a decisive moment then I don't know what is!

Article about the mystery photo here.

Fave bit:

Seconds after the NASA robot's landing Sunday night, Curiosity managed to squeeze off a handful of fuzzy, black-and-white photographs. One, taken with a device on its rear known as a Hazcam, captured the pebble-strewn ground beneath the rover and one of its wheels - and a blotch, faint but distinctive, on the horizon. The images were relayed by a passing satellite. Two hours later, the satellite passed overhead again.

This time, Curiosity sent home a new batch of higher-resolution photos. They showed the same horizon. The blotch was gone. Space junkies raced onto the Internet with giddy speculation about the difference between the photos.

Curiosity, the largest spacecraft ever sent to another planet, had just sailed through deep space for almost nine months and more than 350 million miles. It landed on its own, meaning scientists had no control over where, exactly, it would wind up, what direction it would be pointed in nor when it would snap its first images.

After all of those variables, the space junkies insisted, Curiosity had somehow snapped a photo of its chariot crash-landing a safe distance away, as planned. The camera shutter had been open for 200 milliseconds. The blotch did look like a billowing plume of some sort, erupting from the horizon
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GreatWaves

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