When you’ve got a landing sequence as complicated as the Curiosity’s and seven or so minutes of radio delay, there are plenty of things that can go horribly wrong. Fortunately, the folks at mission control have secret insurance up their sleeves: peanuts. More »
The Mars Curiosity Rover landing is kind of a big deal. There are going to be seven terrifying minutes as the $2.6 billion vehicle executes its wildly complicated descent to the surface. Can you think of a better reason for a party? More »
The Mars Curiosity hasn’t even made it to Mars yet and it’s already made a discovery that vital the future of manned space travel: The exact type of radiation astronauts would likely encounter on their way to the Red Planet. This is so freaking awesome. More »
Matt Heverly has one of the coolest jobs in the Solar System: he drives rovers. On Mars. He drove NASA’s Opportunity rover for four years and now he’s getting ready for the biggest mission in the history of NASA’s planetary exploration—driving the $2.6-billion car-sized Curiosity rover after it lands this Sunday (I will be covering this amazing event live, crossing my fingers, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California). More »
NASA is milking the coming landing of the Curiosity rover for all it’s worth with numerous videos to get people excited about the Rover landing on the surface of the red planet. The nuclear powered Curiosity Rover is set to touch down on the surface of Mars, if all goes well, at 1:31 AM EDT on August 6, 2012.
To promote the landing, NASA has offered up a pair of new videos called Grand Entrance that guide viewers from the entry to Mars’ atmosphere through the descent of the Rover until it’s ready to conduct its mission. The videos have the same exact content and the only difference is the Star Trek actors that narrate. One video is narrated by William Shatner and the other is narrated by Wil Wheaton.
If you can’t see the videos above, you can view Shatner’s video here, and Wheaton’s here. Which one do you prefer?
If you follow the space program at all, you probably know that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, known as Curiosity, is on its way to the red planet. Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on the surface of Mars at 1:31 AM EDT on Monday, August 6. NASA has announced that Curiosity has made what is expected to be its final flight path adjustment before landing early Monday morning inside Mars’ Gale Crater.
To make the trajectory change, thrusters on the laboratory landing vehicle were fired for 6 seconds. The 6 second burst changed the spot where Curiosity will hit the Martian atmosphere by 13 miles. NASA is aiming to set Curiosity down in an 48 square mile area next to Mount Sharp, which rises from the center of Gale Crater.
NASA hopes to study the 3-mile high mountain because it seems to be made from different layers of sediment. NASA hopes studying those layers of up close will help determine whether Mars has ever had the ability to support life.
[via Discovery]
On August 5, NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover team will live seven minutes of absolute terror. Until then, however, they are all playing this new Kinect-based Mars Rover Landing game. Or hopefully not, because that would probably make them even more nervous. More »
Notable computer game designer and programmer Peter Molyneux and his startup company 22Cans unveiled the game Curiosity last month. Curiosity is Molyneux’s first project since he left his tenure at Microsoft Game Studios as Creative Director. Molyneux showed off the game on Spike TV last month and pointed out a few of the game’s interesting feature
Curiosity lets players chip at a cube that’s made up of 60 million different cubes. “You’re presented with this white room. In the middle of the white room is a black cube,” he said. “If you touch on that black cube, you’ll zoom into it. This black cube is made up of millions of tiny little cubes. You can tap away at that cube.”
Molyneux added that Curiosity can support up to a million players, but noted that only one person will be able to unlock the mystery at its core. The game really got us all curious. Thankfully, Eurogamer is reporting that the game will be arriving soon to iOS, Android and PC on August 22. Pricing has yet to be revealed.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: NASA’s Mars rover: Curiosity almost complete, No 3D Rover camera from NASA,
Edited and scored with the dramatic tension of a summer blockbuster trailer, NASA’s put together a gripping short clip that dresses down Curiosity’s mission to Mars for the layman. The “car-sized” rover, set to touchdown on August 5th of this year at 10:31PM PDT, is currently journeying towards the Red Planet on a suicide mission of sorts, with the success of its make it or break it EDL (enter, descent, landing) wracking the nerves of our Space Agency’s greatest minds in advance. Their cause for concern? A period of radio silence, dubbed the “seven minutes of terror” for the amount of time it takes a signal to reach Earth, during which the craft will have already either smashed disastrously into the Martian landscape or nestled perfectly down from the ascend phase on a 21ft long tether. The logistics involved are so numerous and prone to error — slowing the craft from 13,000 mph to 0 mph and then deploying, detaching and avoiding collision with the supersonic parachute for starters — that it’s a wonder the government ever signed off on the project. If it all does come off without a hitch, however, the ladies and gents down at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory certainly deserve several thousand bottles of the finest bubbly taxpayers’ money can buy. Click on past the break to gape at the sequence of engineering feats required to make this landing on terra incognita.
NASA’s Seven Minutes of Terror: Curiosity’s precarious Mars landing explained (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jun 2012 21:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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