UPDATE: Touchdown confirmed! Congratulations NASA JPL! First image received. See below.
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I thought I”d take a minute to advise you that some real science and engineering that will be see from NASA tonight rather than the politically motivated science from scientist turned arrested activist Dr. James Hansen in the latest NASA GISS claim distributed via AP’s compliant repeater, Seth Borenstein. On the plus side, Seth at least gave a voice to the other side.
Readers may recall I photographed and wrote about the Curiosity exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum last year:
Experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) share the challenges of Curiosity’s rover final 7 minutes to landing on the surface of Mars on the 5th of August,2012 ( 10:31 US Pacific time) . Watch the video below, well worth your time.
Curiosity is a Mars rover launched by NASA on November 26, 2011. Currently en route to the planet, it is scheduled to land in Gale Crater on August 5, 2012 ( US Pacific time) . The rover’s objectives include searching for past or present life, studying the Martian climate, studying Martian geology, and collecting data for a future manned mission to Mars. It will explore Mars for 2 years.
Curiosity’s landing Times in regarding time travel zones:
Aug 5, 2012 10:31 p.m. US Pacific
Aug 6, 2012 1:31 a.m. US Eastern
Aug 6, 2012 3:31 p.m. Hobart – Australia
Aug 6, 2012 5:31 a.m Universal (UTC)
Curiosity cost: A cool US$2.5 billion
Cool stuff Bonus (Mars Science Laboratory) such as interactive experiences can be found in:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/
NASA official site:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
NASA-TV coverage starts two hours before landing. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html (h/t to Ric Werme)
UPDATE: Touchdown confirmed! Congratulations NASA! First image received. Will post as soon as I have something to show you.
UPDATE2 self explanatory
I’ll take odds that you’re wrong, because, I’m that kinda guy (I think I recall them testing the old hit, roll, tumble, and bounce technique too) …
Congrats to NASA as well. I would ENJOY seeing more raw telemetry data next time too, including raw RF signal SNR (or bit-error rates) on the heartbeat signal even as that was transmitted in lieu of telemetry during atmospheric ‘entry’ (and presumed mild radio blackout due to enveloping ionization around the space vehicle) …
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Ethnic, religious, gender, dress, ‘hair-cut’ or accessorizing ‘adornments’ (like earrings that one guy was wearing)?
Okay, so they ALL wore blue (what we used to call) ‘project’ shirts!
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Why on earth did John Holdren state “We are actually the only country that has landed surface landers on any other planet” ? My jaw dropped when he said that – the Russians won’t be too pleased about the slight to their successful Venera Venus landings. Surely Holdren as a science adviser should know a major bit of space history ?
Some pictures here…
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/raw/
I was listening to the live feed. Midway through the heat shield entry, they were gettinng UHF data via the Odyssy orbiter. The lander was estimating landing only about 300 meters from the origial target. Part of the entry is actially to fly the “discus” to correct it’s landing point.
After landing, they were going throught the post-landing checklists including vertical touchdown speed (-0.1xxx m/s) and horizontal speed of 0.04 m/s. Then they gave off the lat and long to about 6 or 7 decimal places. “Which is 2.3…” and at that point the life feed cut awat to some interview with the NASA adminstrator Boldin.
Could it be that Couriosity was actually less than 3 meters from target? Even 3 km would be remarkable, but they were probably talking meters for everything.
They landed with 0.14 kg of fuel remaining.
Wonderful – BBC radio reporting safe landing all over the news this morning. Well done NASA JPL, and it’s great to see NASA getting back to its primary skill base. That baroque landing method was incredible!
Although, as a cat lover, I do have one issue with Curiosity …
@Paul Carter, re Holdren’s “… only country that has landed surface landers on any other planet”
I heard it, too. I’ll be charitable and say that he meant “rovers” instead of Landers. But the Russians landed several rovers on the Moon, so Holdren’s comment was weak even if it did contain a slip of the tongue.
Of course they must have tested it with real hardware. Everything else would have been irresponsible and any sane engineer would have quit the project.
Rick Werme – thanks for the links. However, after going to the extent of visiting the local watering hole (to get a good streaming video signal), setting up the feed, getting a couple dozen people interested, most who stayed longer (12:30am in my area) …. image how ticked off they were when CNN showed the successful touchdown on TV.
While it became apparent the alleged “live” stream we’d been watching off an on for 2 hours was anything but – I shut it off 25 minutes after touchdown and they still were 7 minute away from touchdown.
A room full of rocket scientists can send a mission to Mars but can’t handle a simple video stream.
That’s NASA for you in a nutshell.
Stephen Rasey says:
August 5, 2012 at 11:56 pm
They landed with 0.14 kg of fuel remaining
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Stephen, I believe you may be in error. My understanding was at tether separation around 25% of fuel was remaining in the crane element. This was even joked about at the press conference.
Clearly, there are two sides to NASA:
1. The good side of real science represented by Curiosity and pushing out the frontiers of our knowledge in the universe, and
2. The bad side represented by the high profile, alarmist pseudo-science of Hansen and the data manipulation of GISS, but much loved by gullible/devious politicians on the left of politics.
To be clear it WAS an great accomplishment, and I don’t want to take away from that. But they also alienated at least the group of a couple dozen casual observers I was with.
I also agree would have been nice of they had done a simple video overlay of telemetry on the video feed. Instead they showed it for such short periods it was hard to actually make sense of what they were showing.
I hope we are alone. Humans probably wouldn’t get many medals in the ‘real’ Olympic Games if diversity in the universe is vast.
Video of an actual drop test in a lab, looks like full size hardware.
Schrodinger’s space probe? Lets hope that any cats it encounters will be safe…
‘Curiosity cost: A cool US$2.5 billion’
So, about US$10 per person in the USA – compare that with the British Olympics – which cost us in the UK about £150 per person : I know which I think is better value!
Sorry but that wasn’t terror, nervousness sure, not knowing sure, but terror? Nah, terror is a gun man bursting into your space or public event and no one having a gun to fight back!!!
Congratulations to JPL. Amazing feat of engineering. Extremely daring considering the falling reputation of NASA thanks to its non-Aeronautic and Space endeavors.
Not to sound like a party pooper but seeing Holdren and the ‘Moslem Outreach’ Administrator was painful. I wish just for once they would first thank the USA taxpayers that funded the mission (and all the many others) instead of just themselves. I saw a lot of back-slapping and tears of joy, which is fine, but they really should have cut that down to a minute or two (well they would if they understood how they appear to outsiders).
Just for the record I was keeping one eye on the three cable news channels.
MSNBC was busy doing another prison show (probably registering Obama voters) but managed to cut to it just before Touchdown. They were the first to leave, going back to prison even before the back-slapping was complete. I’d say 5 minutes tops.
FOX was busy with Geraldo Rivera going on about the Jackson Family mostly but cut to the landing at about Touchdown minus 3 minutes or so. They hung with it for about 15 minutes total that I could see, then back to Geraldo again.
CNN was on it pretty continuously for around an hour leading up to the landing cutting away momentarily for other news. They stayed with it the longest afterwards for sure and of these three networks, were probably the closest approximation of the way it was done back in the golden age of Apollo. Ugghh, it really pains me to say it, but CNN is still the best for ‘breaking news’, but obviously useless for politics.
P.S. did anyone notice what the nameplate said on that one station (in front of the flag). It was in that row of monitors with vertical displays and the nameplates were on the rearside. I swear it looked to me like: F*K U but my eyes aren’t that great these days. They showed it a few times on NASA TV but by the time I went to grab a screencap each time they cut away again. I’m sure I read it wrong, but now I gotta know just how wrong!
This is a link to about 1 hr 10 minutes of video of the Couriosity Entry Decent Landing (EDL) control room.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/24512027
17:25 (still 4 min from entry) Dynamics….
FYI OD227 miss distance of 232 meters over. Less than the divert.
Entry at 21:08
Mach 2 at 25:00
Parachute deploy: 25:31
Radar: 26:15 ground acquired
Power Flight: at 27:27
1 km at 70m/sec
Skycrane 28:10 30 m altitude
Touchdoun confirmed. 28:42
30:50 – First thumbnail
33:25 – High Res Rear Hazard Cam picture
34:25 – High Res Front Hazard Cam with shadow.
“Page 91 in the procedure”
Holdren’s “only country … surface lander” blunder. 45:10
47:36 Dynamics….
Touchdoun time 10:40:39 PDT UTC “you do the conversion”
Step 730013: Vert. velocity -0.607398 m/s
014: vel hor 0.044365 m/s
Expected fuel remaining at flyaway 140.6 kg
017: offset rover z axis and gravity vector = 4.37 degrees. (tilt)
018: Navigated lat lon calculation
Lat: -4.591817 Long: 137.440247 deg
Navigated range to target of 2.279…(fades away)…
(cut away to the interview with the JPL director)
(end this transcript at 50:00)
Another electric vehicle, no greenhouse gas emissions to cause global warming.
Don’t tell anyone it’s Plutonium powered.
I keep waiting for one of these rovers to come across the sign saying something like “Welcome to Soviet Martian Colony 1”. Not that I expect anyone to still be alive there since the resupply ships from Earth would have stopped coming awhile ago, from no later than after any launches by the USSR would be noticed and given close scrutiny. There might just be only a crash site from the first and last attempt.
But if one was going to pick which nation would have tried it some time ago, that was eager to prove their superiority in space, eager to lay claim on new territory (and why not an entire planet), that wouldn’t have had qualms about sending people off on what was expected to likely be a one-way suicide mission…
How long would such debris stay noticeable? Could it be covered over by dust, etc? How would we ever know a manned landing had never been tried before?
Looks like there is at least one group of NASA experts that know what they are doing.
Well done, their choice of landing method has been vindicated. I only hope NASA keeps looking out from Earth as that is what they do best.
At 24:24 of the above ustream.tv link is a dashboard soon during entry. It shows 391 kg of fuel with the gauge at about 95%.
at 28:15 is another flash of the dashboard during skycrane.
178 kg fuel,
0.76 m/s velocity
18.71 m altitude.
(BTW, sorry about the erroneous “landed with 0.14 kg fuel”.
It was 140 kg, about 25 % of the total. )
Rob Vermeulen says:
August 5, 2012 at 11:01 pm
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Well, it worked…
“And suddenly, computer models of complex systems that were here described as irrelevant and/or false revealed to be accurate enough to land a spacecraft remotely, on another planet”.
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Engineering models are based on real world parameters that are known unlike Climate models based on assumptions and unknown parameters.