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Mars rover beams back 'awesome' shot of surface
Topic Started: 8 Aug 2012, 01:20 AM (43 Views)
skibboy
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Mars rover beams back 'awesome' shot of surface
By the CNN Wire Staff
August 7, 2012

(CNN) -- NASA released the first color images of the surface of Mars from its new rover Curiosity on Tuesday, showing a dusty, tan desert dominated by the rim of the crater where the craft landed.

The image -- shot at an angle by a camera on Curiosity's still-stowed robotic arm -- shows the sandy plain ahead of the rover and the northern rim of Gale Crater, where the rover touched down early Monday.

The image was shot through a retractable, transparent dust shield over the lens, making it "kind of murky," said Ken Edgett, a senior scientist for the camera's builder, Malin Space Science Systems.

Controllers wanted to make sure the camera still functioned after Curiosity's 352-million-mile voyage and harrowing landing early Monday, Edgett told reporters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"This was basically a focus test," he said, adding, "It works. It's awesome. We can't wait to open it and see what else we can see."

Posted Image
This view of the landscape to the north of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity was acquired by the Mars Hand Lens Imager on Monday afternoon, the first day after landing.

The crater rim seen in the photo is more than 20 km (12.5 miles) from the rover, Edgett said.

Other images beamed back in the first day and a half since the landing include include 297 low-resolution color images of the final minutes of its descent.

The pictures, posted on the space agency's website, show some of the gyrations Curiosity went through beneath its parachute and the dust kicked up as it touched down.

The $2.6 billion rover made its dramatic arrival on Martian terrain in a spectacle popularly known as the "seven minutes of terror."

The landing involve a sky crane and the world's largest supersonic parachute, which allowed the spacecraft carrying Curiosity to target the landing area that scientists had meticulously chosen.

The probe was in "great shape" 36 hours after landing as NASA starts to activate the rover's systems, mission manager Michael Watkins said Tuesday afternoon.

But he noted that adjustments need to be made to at least two systems.

Controllers plan to spend Curiosity's next day raising the mast that holds many of its remote sensors and tweak the high-bandwidth antenna that connects the rover to Earth.

"The antenna mechanism is in fine shape, but it was not quite pointed accurately enough at the Earth for us to get the telecom signal that we wanted," Watkins said.

And the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station "did not work correctly" the second time the team tried to test its sensors, leading the researchers behind that project to go back and re-check the unit's data files.

"I would say that it does not appear to be significant at this time," Watkins said. "But these guys are off working it, and it's their baby. Let's let them think about it for a while."

The unit, known as the REMS, monitors ground and air temperatures, humidity, atmospheric pressure and ultraviolet light.

Despite the glitches, Watkins said controllers remain in high spirits.
"These are the days that people worked five and 10 years for, going on right now," he said.

Curiosity is essentially a car-sized mobile science laboratory, packing 17 cameras, a laser that can survey the composition of rocks from a distance and instruments that can analyze samples from soil or rocks.

The aim is to determine whether Mars ever had an environment capable of supporting life.

Its prime target is the 18,000-foot (5,500-meter) peak at the center of Gale Crater, Mount Sharp.

Posted Image
This image shows Curiosity's main science target, Mount Sharp. The rover's shadow can be seen in the foreground. The dark bands in the distances are dunes.

The stratified composition of the mountain could give scientists a layer-by-layer look at the history of the planet.

Curiosity's landing site is about 12 km (7.5 miles) from the foot of the mountain, NASA project scientist Sara Milkovich said.

The rover is supposed to last for two years on Mars, but it may operate longer -- after all, Spirit and Opportunity, which arrived on Mars in 2004, were each only supposed to last 90 Martian days.

Spirit stopped communicating with NASA in 2010 after getting stuck in sand, and Opportunity is still going.

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skibboy
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Mars rover captures nearby rocket 'footprint'

By the CNN Wire Staff
August 8, 2012

Posted Image
This is a composite image made from two full-resolution images of the Martian surface from the Navigation cameras on the rover, which are located on its "head" or mast.
The rim of Gale Crater can be seen in the distance beyond the pebbly ground. The foreground shows two distinct zones of excavation likely carved out by blasts from the rover's descent stage thrusters.

Pasadena, California (CNN) -- The Mars rover Curiosity successfully raised the mast that holds many of its instruments Wednesday, giving controllers a view of the ground scorched by the rockets that deposited it on the surface.

The car-sized rover landed on Mars early Monday after a harrowing descent that climaxed with its being lowered by a "skycrane" that hovered over the landing site.

Cameras mounted on Curiosity's remote sensing mast beamed back fresh images of the site once the column was raised into position, giving NASA a view of the roughly half-meter (19-inch) "scour marks" from the rocket exhaust.

Those gouges are giving mission controllers an unexpectedly early view of the bedrock beneath the surface of Gale Crater, said John Grotzinger, a Curiosity project scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

"Apparently, there is a harder, rockier material beneath this veneer of gravel and pebbles, and obviously there's some impact ejecta," Grotzinger told reporters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where controllers operate the rover.

While Curiosity isn't yet ready to start driving around, "Here we've already got an exploration hole drilled for us," Grotzinger said.

The mission of the mobile science laboratory is to determine whether Mars ever had an environment capable of supporting life.

Its prime target is the 18,000-foot (5,500-meter) peak at the center of Gale Crater, Mount Sharp, where scientists hope to get a layer-by-layer look at the history of the planet.

Grotzinger said so far, the landscape looks somewhat familiar.

"The thing that really struck the science team about this image is that you would really be forgiven for thinking that NASA was trying to pull a fast one on you and we actually put a rover out in the Mojave Desert and took a picture -- a little L.A. smog coming in there," he said.

Controllers are still activating Curiosity's instrument package, and all antennas that will beam back data to JPL "work perfectly," mission manager Jennifer Trosper said Wednesday.

The onboard weather monitoring unit has turned out to be "completely healthy" following a brief glitch reported Tuesday.

The high-bandwidth antenna that aims back at Earth is beaming back "lots and lots of data" and the rover is expected to capture a color panorama of its surroundings on Thursday, she said.

"There are going to be some amazing images from that," Trosper said.

Vandi Tompkins, one of Curiosity's operators, said images like those beamed back so far will be used to program the rover's movements when it gets under way.

Because of the time needed for a radio signal from Earth to reach the rover -- about 14 minutes at Mars' current position -- "We don't command the rover with a joystick or a steering wheel in real time," Tompkins said. "If we were to do that, by the time we would see we were at the edge of a cliff, the rover would have driven off of it."

Instead, operators use the photos to develop a plan for the next day's operations and transmit it to the rover, which carries it out and sends back the results.

Curiosity will start its third full martian day, or sol, on Thursday.

A sol is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth.

The rover is supposed to run for two years, but a previous rover, Opportunity, has been working on Mars since 2004 -- well beyond the three months NASA planned.

Opportunity's sister rover, Spirit, ran from 2004 to 2010.

CNN's John Zarrella contributed to this report.

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