Further to Wote's post about the Mars landing and in case you haven't seen it, here's the fabulous NASA JPL You Tube animation [shortened] of their mission to the red planet. It features the amazing Mars rover Curiosity and my personal favourite, the Sky Crane. What do you think the Rover will find?
Wotan Wades in:
Ive just seen this amazing image of image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE)
camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) capturing the
Curiosity rover still connected to its 51-foot (almost 16 meter)-wide
parachute as it descended toward its landing site at Gale Crater Sunday. The probe is about 2 miles from the surface of Mars and close to deployment of the Skycrane. Amazing.
the skycrane is real thunderbirds territory - especially as it was broadcast as Seven Minutes of Terror! Its all quite amazing when you consider that the operation was all conducted by Curiosity itself,while it was out of contact with JPL.
ReplyDeleteIm confident that evidence of life will be found. Even if it is only on the microbial level. Anyone fancy a bet ?
Love the Skycrane. Seems it blasts away to crash a few hundred metres away from the landing site. Pity as I hoped it would achieve orbit and remain up there.
ReplyDeleteYes, its a shame, but it only carried enough juice for a braking manouevre. seems mars will be littered with space junk like the moon soon!
ReplyDeleteWith the price of scrap iron quite high at the moment it might be worth nipping over to Mars and claiming it - luvly jubly!
ReplyDeleteMaybe some enterprising junkyard dealer will build his own space salvage spaceship. How many people remember Andy Griffith's short-lived 'Salvage 1' TV show?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HODkJABWo08
A beautiful mission. I didn't think that NASA would excite us again but this unmanned adventure has. A real coup and awe-inspiring. I'd sign up tomorrow to be a member of a Mars colony. If the Curiosity can tweet from there then I'm pretty sure I could blog from there too! Anyone else want to join a colony?
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