Soldato
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Good of course, but other places now please, I have a feeling these probes will gather so much info it will be an excuse not to send humans
** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **
- Thread starter Cosimo
- Start date
Good of course, but other places now please, I have a feeling these probes will gather so much info it will be an excuse not to send humans
Soldato
Soldato
MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY MISSION STATUS REPORT
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Curiosity flexed its robotic arm today for the first time since before launch in November 2011.
The 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm maneuvers a turret of tools including a camera, a drill, a spectrometer, a scoop and mechanisms for sieving and portioning samples of powdered rock and soil.
"We have had to sit tight for the first two weeks since landing, while other parts of the rover were checked out, so to see the arm extended in these images is a huge moment for us," said Matt Robinson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead engineer for Curiosity's robotic arm testing and operations. "The arm is how we are going to get samples into the laboratory instruments and how we place other instruments onto surface targets."
Weeks of testing and calibrating arm movements are ahead before the arm delivers a first sample of Martian soil to instruments inside the rover. Monday's maneuver checked motors and joints by unstowing the arm for the first time, extending it forward using all five joints, then stowing it again in preparation for the rover's first drive.
"It worked just as we planned," said JPL's Louise Jandura, sample system chief engineer for Curiosity. "From telemetry and from the images received this morning, we can confirm that the arm went to the positions we commanded it to go to."
The image of Curiosity's arm is online at: http://1.usa.gov/OSyG3B .
The turret has a mass of about 66 pounds (30 kilograms). Its diameter, including the tools mounted on it, is nearly 2 feet (60 centimeters).
"We'll start using our sampling system in the weeks ahead, and we're getting ready to try our first drive later this week," said Mars Science Laboratory Deputy Project Manager Richard Cook of JPL.
Curiosity landed on Mars two weeks ago to begin a two-year mission using 10 instruments to assess whether a carefully chosen study area inside Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project, including Curiosity, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the rover. The Space Division of MDA Information Systems Inc. built the robotic arm in Pasadena.
More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Curiosity flexed its robotic arm today for the first time since before launch in November 2011.
The 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm maneuvers a turret of tools including a camera, a drill, a spectrometer, a scoop and mechanisms for sieving and portioning samples of powdered rock and soil.
"We have had to sit tight for the first two weeks since landing, while other parts of the rover were checked out, so to see the arm extended in these images is a huge moment for us," said Matt Robinson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead engineer for Curiosity's robotic arm testing and operations. "The arm is how we are going to get samples into the laboratory instruments and how we place other instruments onto surface targets."
Weeks of testing and calibrating arm movements are ahead before the arm delivers a first sample of Martian soil to instruments inside the rover. Monday's maneuver checked motors and joints by unstowing the arm for the first time, extending it forward using all five joints, then stowing it again in preparation for the rover's first drive.
"It worked just as we planned," said JPL's Louise Jandura, sample system chief engineer for Curiosity. "From telemetry and from the images received this morning, we can confirm that the arm went to the positions we commanded it to go to."
The image of Curiosity's arm is online at: http://1.usa.gov/OSyG3B .
The turret has a mass of about 66 pounds (30 kilograms). Its diameter, including the tools mounted on it, is nearly 2 feet (60 centimeters).
"We'll start using our sampling system in the weeks ahead, and we're getting ready to try our first drive later this week," said Mars Science Laboratory Deputy Project Manager Richard Cook of JPL.
Curiosity landed on Mars two weeks ago to begin a two-year mission using 10 instruments to assess whether a carefully chosen study area inside Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project, including Curiosity, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the rover. The Space Division of MDA Information Systems Inc. built the robotic arm in Pasadena.
More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .
Good of course, but other places now please, I have a feeling these probes will gather so much info it will be an excuse not to send humans
Considering that Mars has been subjected to the abuse of cosmic radiation and other such things, i can only imagine the treasure trove of higher elemental deposits on the planet.
It would be an extremely lucrative mining Operation, especially since it seems there is a tonne of iron there, would be relatively cheap to construct right on Mars itself once the initial costs are dealt with.
USSR had an appalling record of success with Mars landings.
Edit: In fact every Russian lander project failed with the exception of one that landed then died after 15 seconds.
The point was that they did that in the early seventies as well as landed Lunar rovers that sampled many many rocks and returned masses of data. The USA didn't surpass them on rovers until 2004. Because the USSR higher ups only viewed space exploration as a chance to outdo the USA they cut funding for Mars projects when it became apparent that the USA didn't have the technology to join in with rovers (manned missions to Mars being inconceivable at that time). Had they continued we can only dream of the possibilities.
Good of course, but other places now please, I have a feeling these probes will gather so much info it will be an excuse not to send humans
Hopefully not, it is the reason the USSR never landed on the moon though
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Caporegime
On the news right now, that NASA reports that some of the sensors in the weather station on the rover is damaged.
Caporegime
I wonder how and when that happened, if it landed smoothly?
Soldato
RBSP goes up on Friday (24th). It’s launch window is 09:07 thru 09:27 BST (04:07 thru 04:27 EDT).
Man of Honour
Full HD actual Curiosity video (comp from imagery) now live:
Associate
Very cool.
Amazing how quickly the decent stops when the retro rockets fire up too.
Amazing how quickly the decent stops when the retro rockets fire up too.
Man of Honour
Associate
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Soldato
In addition to what mrk said, the playback is also sped up. If I remember correctly, the descent imager recorded at 4 frames per second. That video is clearly playing at more than 4 frames per second. If nothing else, there should have been several minutes between heatshield separation and landing, not 50 seconds.