Photo shows Mars rover descent

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19150849

by zoowar • 14 years ago

187 59 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

danielsju6• 14 years ago

Larger photo from NASA here, http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/673727main_PIA15980-full_...

biomechanica• 14 years ago

Every single time I look at images captured by the rovers on Mars, it throws a wave of tingles through my spine.

The technology and brain power to achieve this picture, the landing, engineering and the science to come is so mind blowing to me that I almost feel drained!

Such a massive amount of awesomeness.

sek• 14 years ago

is there one without the white box?

pfraze• 14 years ago

Would make a great desktop

3JPLW2• 14 years ago

I've been looking for one as well. It appears as though they're still working on releasing more of the images.

The HiRISE news release[1] now contains a (currently broken) link[2] to a 540MB non-map projected "descent long view." I imagine this is the complete scan that HiRISE took of the image, and that there is distortion due to the CCD layout in the satellite (hence non-map projected). But that's purely a guess.

They say:

  Descent long view[2] (Note: this file is over 540MB. It is non-map projected
  but rotated so that north is approximately up. This file is not annotated, 
  but MSL is in the mid-to-lower right-hand side. The CCDs do not match well at 
  their edges due to the unique image geometry; geometrically-corrected images 
  would be available in a few days.)

1: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/releases/msl-descent.php

2: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2012/details/cut/ESP_02... (WARNING: 540MB TIFF, but link is broken at time of posting)

benwerd• 14 years ago

NASA is a wonder of our modern age. If we're going to have a planned economy (and we are), let's do it through science, technology and knowledge rather than military power.

joering22• 14 years ago

700B for DOD, versus 8B NASA. 87x difference. If NASA would have 87x more money, by now we would have a Martian base and most likely missions where civilians could buy a ticket and fly there for a honeymoon.

JVIDEL• 14 years ago

Yeah funny how much we spend on stuff that blows up (or never does because it's never used and we have to spend even more billions dismantling them).

cowkingdeluxe• 14 years ago

But at the same time the USA spends more money on space programs than all other countries combined.

ck2• 14 years ago

TSA gets more money than NASA!

(and TSA is just a tiny part of "homeland security (theater)" )

rbanffy• 14 years ago

To be fair, a lot of money that went into ICBM research ended up being applied by NASA.

But I agree with you. If only we could convince the five top military spenders to cut back just a little, we'd be terraforming Mars and Venus by the end of the week. ;-)

josephagoss• 14 years ago

Interesting, what makes you so sure we are going to become a planned economy when it was partially the governments corruption in the first place that helped lead to this mess.

I know you mean USA. I wonder if the USA would force my country (Australia) to follow suit to? Hard to imagine.

Also isn't China meant to be growing at a unstable rate and is now ready for its own property market collapse. And isn't China the only real example of a working centrally planned economy?

I'm just really interested how you are so sure we are heading towards a planned economy as a system.

ekianjo• 14 years ago

I don't see a case to make the funding of NASA greater. What has the recent Dragon (by SpaceX) experiment proved is that NASA usually does things in a more expensive way than private parties. It would more efficient to outsource most of this research to do more with the same budget.

joering22• 14 years ago

it says: "nuclear battery". it looks small. can someone point me to some more details? Obviously if they decided its fine to shoot this thing into the space (go through Earth atmosphere) - it should mean that there was no environmental danger for this thing to go bad?

warfangle• 14 years ago

It uses a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). Many spacecraft use them. The Apollo 13 RTG is currently at rest on the ocean floor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...

jlgreco5• 14 years ago

Nuclear batteries are unlike what we normally think of as "nuclear reactors". They both use heat, but nuclear batteries do not bring the fuel to criticality (in other words, no chain reaction). This limits their power output obviously, but they are pretty damn reliable in return.

The one in Curiosity seems to have 5kg of Plutonium 238. I don't know what kind of containment it has to protect it during launch, but I assume it is fairly substantial. Nuclear batteries are not something NASA is new to, they have used them many times before, including in the Voyager probes.

Interestingly, nuclear reactors have been put into space too, by both the US and the Soviets. There have been incidents but nothing that I would really call a disaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RORSAT

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

It's an RTG, it uses the heat created by decay of radioactive isotopes to drive a thermocouple. These things have been designed to be incredibly safe, capable of surviving an explosion of their launch vehicle and remaining intact, for example. But even should their protective capsule be breached the radioactive material is in a ceramic (oxidized) form in spheres. If you cracked open an RTG and threw the insides into a very hot fire nothing would happen, you could just come by and collect the intact ceramic spheres after they'd cooled.

tocomment• 14 years ago

So ignoring the safety issues, would there be enough radioactive isotopes on Earth for every house to have it's own RTG? Imagine unlimited energy, and heat your home with the waste heat?

matt20002• 14 years ago

I thought there was a ban on radioactive materials being launched by NASA but I couldn't find anything about it, does anyone know any more?

missing_cipher• 14 years ago

The coordination of all this just blows my mind.

outworlder2• 14 years ago

Anyone has any background info on that picture? How did the MRO lock on the descending rover?

Did NASA feed it the correct coordinates beforehand, or it had to somehow autonomously acquire the rover? I suspect the later is possible, as there might be radio contact available in that stage of the reentry, but I really have no idea on how it was actually accomplished.

markbnine• 14 years ago

Here is a link to a Nature blog with some info from Alfred McEwen, the PI on HiRISE:

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/mars-orbiter-plans-for-...

timkeller• 14 years ago

NASA is just rocking this mission. Very impressed.

matt20002• 14 years ago

This to me feels really sci-fi since "we sent a rover to mars and another thing we already had hanging around took a picture of it." That feels pretty neat.

startupfounder5• 14 years ago

It looks like they had the coordinates of the decent path of Curiosity, knew where to point the camera, took a large picture from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) like they did with Phoenix [1] and then when that picture hit human eyes NASA cropped it. That being said, if they have multiple HiRISE images of the decent[2] I think that would make one amazing film. Anyone know the FPS of HiRISE? [1]http://blogs.nature.com/news/files/2012/08/PhoenixHiRise.jpg [2]http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/62081000/jpg/_62081182...

jimktrains22• 14 years ago

In the article it says that they basically took the only picture they could. A second later or sooner and they'd have seen a landscape only.

startupfounder5• 14 years ago

Looks like there was quite a lot of time for taking pictures[1], 172 second to be exact between parachute deployment and touchdown.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/672880main_martin_mur-1-4...

trothamel• 14 years ago

If I understand and remember it correctly, HiRISE doesn't have an FPS in the traditional sense. It's best to think of the detector as a one-dimensional array of pixels. The motion of the satellite in its orbit then sweeps this array over the ground, allowing two-dimensional images to be made - one of the dimensions is time, but when something is moving, time becomes a spatial dimension.

startupfounder5• 14 years ago

Interesting, its like "scanning" not a shutter "clicking". That being said it was much more likely given the MRO's orbit that it would be able to scan Mars and have Curiosity in that scan path. You can even correlate the angle of the photo to the location of the MRO: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/672880main_martin_mur-1-4...

mturmon• 14 years ago

Good point. It's called "pushbroom scanning" and is used on lots of remote sensing satellites.

http://hirise.seti.org/epo/hirise_lesson1.htm

elorant• 14 years ago

Well it's not that simple because you have to take under consideration that MRO also moves. So basically you have two objects moving at some thousand kilometers per hour in different trajectories and you have an open window of a few seconds to take the picture.

startupfounder5• 14 years ago

Ok, who wants to play a game? Where was MRO in this picture: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/672880main_martin_mur-1-4... when it took this picture: http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/62081000/jpg/_62081182... Height of the parachute is 50m while the width is 16m. GO!

jessriedel• 14 years ago

My impression is that they only got the opportunity for one shot with the HiRISE camera, but that they were going for a view of the sky-crane in action. Did that turn out not to be possible? Do they have a picture of the sky-crane from one of the lower-resolution cameras in orbit?

Photo shows Mars rover descent

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