Mars Rover Curiosity

[BridgeTroll]

First pic of a color panorama...

[Jason]

Those photos look so eerie to me.  It's just not computing that the rover is actually on different planet.

What is the average temp in that area?

[subro]

Those photos look so eerie to me.  It's just not computing that the rover is actually on different planet.

What is the average temp in that area?

Temps range from -20°F during the day to -200°F during the night.

[TheCat]

Nixon's prepared speech if Armstrong and Aldrin were not able to make it back to earth from the moon in 1969.

[subro]

The Coolest Thing on Earth: Looking Around Mars on Your Phone

By Robinson Meyer

Take out your phone and click on the link below. Just do it.

This http://www.360cities.net/image/curiosity-rover-martian-solar-day-2#30.26,-8.03,61.5 is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Not the photo above, but what lies through that link.

Pause: As per the instructions of Joel Housman who first recommended this, you need to be on an iPhone or iPad, or maybe a tablet browser, for it to have its full effect. On an iPad or iPhone, you should open it in Safari, not a Twitter client's browser. But then just click the link.

This is a 360 degree view of the planet Mars.

If you move the phone in any direction, it acts as a window, and the view moves with it. If you look down, you see the rocks and gravel of Mars. If you point the phone up, you see the small sun and the planet's sour sky. If you look to the horizon and tilt your phone, you see the rocks and dirt close to you move faster than the furthest points; it feels like you're standing there. Just try it, even if you have to borrow someone's phone.

Show it to your parents. Show it to your kids. If you're a teacher, start the first day of school by passing around your iPhone and saying, "This is why you're learning math."

Here is what this visualization has shocked me into: Mars, through this app, isn't a series of inquiries or a collection of images. It's a planet. It has a horizon, and there are a thounsand thousand views of that horizon. It has rocks, and there are a thousand thousand of those. It looks upon a sun, in a sky, which, from any vantage point, might look any of a thousand thousand ways.

Mars is a planet, full of places.

This view demands wonder. For this view, of another planet's horizon, of another planet that's just a single clump of matter out from ours, in just one galaxy that happens to be ours in the universe. There are countless horizons like this, horizons beyond our reckoning.

UPDATE: To maximize enjoyment, some of Curiosity's images were altered or augmented. Carl Franzen, at Talking Points Memo, explains the process.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/the-coolest-thing-on-earth-looking-around-mars-on-your-phone/261173/

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

[Overstreet]

First pic of a color panorama...

Oh Look a truck burn out in the gravel.

[BridgeTroll]

08.17.2012
Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA Curiosity Team Pinpoints Site For First Drive

PASADENA, Calif. -- The scientists and engineers of NASA's Curiosity rover mission have selected the first driving destination for their one-ton, six-wheeled mobile Mars laboratory. The target area, named Glenelg, is a natural intersection of three kinds of terrain. The choice was described by Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology during a media teleconference on Aug. 17.
"With such a great landing spot in Gale Crater, we literally had every degree of the compass to choose from for our first drive," Grotzinger said. "We had a bunch of strong contenders. It is the kind of dilemma planetary scientists dream of, but you can only go one place for the first drilling for a rock sample on Mars. That first drilling will be a huge moment in the history of Mars exploration."

The trek to Glenelg will send the rover 1,300 feet (400 meters) east-southeast of its landing site. One of the three types of terrain intersecting at Glenelg is layered bedrock, which is attractive as the first drilling target.

"We're about ready to load our new destination into our GPS and head out onto the open road," Grotzinger said. "Our challenge is there is no GPS on Mars, so we have a roomful of rover-driver engineers providing our turn-by-turn navigation for us."

Prior to the rover's trip to Glenelg, the team in charge of Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, is planning to give their mast-mounted, rock-zapping laser and telescope combination a thorough checkout. On Saturday night, Aug. 18, ChemCam is expected to "zap" its first rock in the name of planetary science. It will be the first time such a powerful laser has been used on the surface of another world.

"Rock N165 looks like your typical Mars rock, about three inches wide. It's about 10 feet away," said Roger Wiens, principal investigator of the ChemCam instrument from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. "We are going to hit it with 14 millijoules of energy 30 times in 10 seconds. It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, it should be pretty cool too."

Mission engineers are devoting more time to planning the first roll of Curiosity. In the coming days, the rover will exercise each of its four steerable (front and back) wheels, turning each of them side-to-side before ending up with each wheel pointing straight ahead. On a later day, the rover will drive forward about one rover-length (10 feet, or 3 meters), turn 90 degrees, and then kick into reverse for about 7 feet (2 meters).

"There will be a lot of important firsts that will be taking place for Curiosity over the next few weeks, but the first motion of its wheels, the first time our roving laboratory on Mars does some actual roving, that will be something special," said Michael Watkins, mission manager for Curiosity from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

[BridgeTroll]

http://www.livescience.com/22556-mars-rover-stretches-robot-arm.html

Mars Rover Curiosity Flexes Robotic Arm for 1st Time

by SPACE.com Staff

Date: 21 August 2012 Time: 02:48 AM ET

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity flexed its long robotic arm for the first time on the Red Planet Aug. 20, passing a critical health check with flying colors, mission managers say.
 
The rover unfolded the robotic arm and performed an intricate series of test maneuvers to make sure the 7-foot-long (2.1-meter) appendage is in good working order. Curiosity's robotic arm has five joints and is tipped with sophisticated instruments to get up close and personal with Mars.
 
Monday's Martian workout flexed all five joints on the robotic arm to extend it out in front of Curiosity, and then fold it back into its travel position ahead of the rover's first drive, which is also expected to occur in the next few days.

"It worked just as we planned," Louise Jandura, Curiosity's sample system chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "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."
 
Curiosity's robotic arm is one of the rover's most powerful toolkits. At the end of the arm is a bulky 66-pound (30-kilogram) turret that is nearly 2 feet wide (60 centimeters).

The arm's turret contains a drill that can dig 1 inch (2.5 cm) into Martian rocks, a scoop and other gear for collecting samples, a camera for microscopic analyses, and a spectrometer to determine the composition of rocket and surface targets.
 
"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 Richard Cook, NASA's deputy project manager for the Curiosity mission.
 
But more robotic arm tests are needed before Curiosity can begin using the appendage to study Mars.  The arm, mission managers said, must past several calibration checks to make sure it is working properly.
 
"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 NASA's lead engineer for the robotic arm testing. "The arm is how we are going to get samples into the laboratory instruments and how we place other instruments onto surface targets.
 
Curiosity's robotic arm is one of 10 high-tech instruments built into the car-size rover to study Mars like never before. 
 
Monday's arm checkout came one day after Curiosity shot a nearby rock with a laser built into its mast to make sure the tool worked. That tool is part of Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (or ChemCam) instrument that determines the composition of targets by zapping them with a laser beam and then analyzing the light from the resulting sparks. The laser system, like the robotic arm, worked as expected.
 
The $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity touched down on the Red Planet on Aug. 5 and is expected to spend at least two years exploring its Gale Crater landing site. The rover is designed to determine if the region could have ever supported microbial life.

[Dog Walker]

Thanks for the updates, BT.  I was beginning to think that I was the only space nut left around.  Maybe it's because I've been around since the very beginning and remember all of the firsts.  Saw Sputnick go over with my own telescope, saw the first TV relay from Telestar, cried over Lyca the dog, watched Armstrong step down from the lander,  was anchored in the Indian River when the first Venus probe was launched.

Exciting times and I hope we never become ho-hum about these adventures.

[wsansewjs]

Thanks for the updates, BT.  I was beginning to think that I was the only space nut left around.  Maybe it's because I've been around since the very beginning and remember all of the firsts.  Saw Sputnick go over with my own telescope, saw the first TV relay from Telestar, cried over Lyca the dog, watched Armstrong step down from the lander,  was anchored in the Indian River when the first Venus probe was launched.

Exciting times and I hope we never become ho-hum about these adventures.

You are not the only one who is a space-nut as well! There are plenty of us who are so fascinated and interested in this stuff.

Keep cranking out, BT!

-Josh

[BridgeTroll]

Thanks for the updates, BT.  I was beginning to think that I was the only space nut left around.  Maybe it's because I've been around since the very beginning and remember all of the firsts.  Saw Sputnick go over with my own telescope, saw the first TV relay from Telestar, cried over Lyca the dog, watched Armstrong step down from the lander,  was anchored in the Indian River when the first Venus probe was launched.

Exciting times and I hope we never become ho-hum about these adventures.

You saw a bit more than I did... but have been an avid follower since Apollo...

[Jason]

It seems that there is a lot more press about Curiosity versus the the sparse mentions of the other two explorers that have been on Mars for years.

[fsujax]

This is exciting and fun to follow.

[BridgeTroll]

It seems that there is a lot more press about Curiosity versus the the sparse mentions of the other two explorers that have been on Mars for years.

They got a good bit of press early in their missions also.  Remeber those were only supposed to last two months.  They lived wayyyy past their intended lives...

[Dog Walker]

Wouldn't it be neat if Curiosity lived proportionally longer than the projected life as the other rovers!  It would be around to take pictures of the first people landing on Mars.