Hasta La Gadget!

This morning you might as well get your eyes towards the skies because the most fabulous event in space in many, many years has occurred: we’ve landed on Mars again! You’ll be able to read and watch everything surrounding the NASA Mars Curiosity Rover from its Morse code tire tracks to the full landing video as it happened last night! Have a peek at the one detailed photo taken by the rover thus far as well as some of the first collection of photos – and check out the final landing post as well – it’s full of celebration!

This is one gigantic project to say the least – congratulations NASA! We’ve also got a SlashGear 101: NASA’s Curiosity Mars Landing Start to Finish for you and a fine feature written entirely by NASA Engineer Gavin Mendeck: Countdown to Mars: Thoughts from a NASA Curiosity engineer!

And don’t forget the leaked photo of the landing of the craft as well- parachute and all!

Back here on earth we’ve got a few more updates from companies that continue to function even though we’re drowning in peanuts. AT&T has announced the date for their shared data plans. The Next iPhone’s nano-SIM tray had been revealed. There’s a new advertisement out for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 that we must assume will be out SOON!

Lenovo has let it be known that they’re coming up on Windows 8 with love for tablets but a little bit less optimism for ultrabooks. There’s a new HTC Proto device out there to take out the One V. It’s been said that Steve Jobs was “very receptive” to an iPad mini behind the scenes. And for those of you looking to continue the space travel love fest, don’t miss the death cry of a dying sun astronomers have picked up being swallowed by a black hole!

SlashGear Morning Wrap-Up: August 6th, 2012 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The first photo of the Curiosity lander making its final journey through the Martian atmosphere has emerged, a rare image of the huge parachute used to slow the Skycrane and its expensive cargo. The picture was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and though low-resolution clearly shows the dangling cradle beneath the 16m wide “supersonic parachute” that slowed it from around 578 m/s to 100 m/s.

After that point, the parachute was detached and Curiosity and the Skycrane used rockets to level off and slow to the point where the rover could be carefully lowered to the Martian surface. The full landing process – which was all done automatically, since time delays in radio transmissions between Mars and Earth meant direct remote control was impossible – is detailed here.

This first photo lacks detail, but there’s far more impressive media to come. Part of the equipment Curiosity carried was the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI), a full color camera which fired off four frames per second during the landing. The ensuring video is expected to be beamed back to Earth in roughly a week’s time.

NASA is expected to release more photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter later in the day, at which point we’ll hopefully get a better view of exactly what went on during that tumultuous ”Seven Minutes of Terror.” As for what comes next, check out our guest editorial by NASA engineer Gavin Mendeck on Curiosity, the Mars project and the future of space exploration.

Curiosity landing photo from NASA’s Mars Orbiter revealed is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

So MSL Curiosity has landed. It survived the seven minutes of terror and safely touched down on the surface of Mars. A miracle in its own right. Now that it’s there, it needs a way to move around. Anyone who played Lunar Lander and Moon Patrol already knows how they’re going to do this: Video games. More »

NASA’s Curiosity rover may be getting to grips with its new home, but if you didn’t stay up (or get up) to watch the momentous “Seven Minutes of Terror” landing then here’s the video you need to see. The culmination of a 39-week journey from Earth to Mars, the descent was completely programmed as, thanks to time-delays of around fourteen minutes between NASA control and the Curiosity lander and Skycrane itself, there was no way it could be actively remote controlled. Cue several nail-biting minutes as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory stayed glued to its telemetrics.

In fact, those telemetrics were of a journey that had already begun and ended: by the time the first signs of Curiosity hitting Mars’ upper atmosphere appeared on their screens, the condition of the landing – safe or otherwise – had already been decided. That certainly explains the anxious faces and – eventual – glee of the team when the numbers begin to come through.

Confused by the “peanuts tradition” references you may have heard about the landing? Apparently the good-luck practice began after the first successful Ranger program to land on the moon, which coincided with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory team member eating peanuts. Now, every mission begins with some peanuts to keep channeling that track record.

Curiosity landing video:

Since Curiosity and the Skycrane couldn’t beam back their own footage, NASA’s own renderings of the landing process gives more details on the challenge the JPL team undertook. There are images from the first batch beamed back to Earth from Curiosity here.

Seven Minutes of Terror:

NASA Curiosity landing video: Relive the peanuts moment is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Safely landed on Mars, NASA‘s Curiosity rover dwarfs its robot predecessors by a factor of 2:1, though we’ll need to wait for it to take off its lenscap before we get a proper look at the Martian surface. Measuring 3m long, the six-wheeled Curiosity is double the size of the previous Exploration rovers and uses its heft to carry fifteen times heftier instruments with which it will check for evidence of life on the red planet.

In fact, Curiosity is five times heavier than previous landers, and – as the group photo above shows – is more akin to a small car than the human-scaled rovers that came before it. Altogether, that has allowed for equipment of the sort never before taken to Mars: Curiosity carries a laser that can check out the elemental composition of distant rocks, for instance, while close-up testing is done by loading an internally-carried lab with samples gathered up by a robotic arm.

First step, however, will be orienting Curiosity and gathering some photos for the album. The first batch of shots already sent back to Earth are comparatively low-resolution, since they were taken with the so-called “Hazcam”; in contrast, the two main cameras will grab full color 1600 x 1200 stills (or 720p video at 10fps), but will only be operation when the “head” of the rover is unpacked and extended.

At that point, the Hazcams – of which there are four, at the extremes of the rover – will be used for autonomous navigation, building a 3D perspective of the environment around Curiosity and its robotic arm. There are seventeen cameras in total, spanning visible light through more specific purposes depending on the scientific intention.

NASA expects the Curiosity mission to last two years, though it’s possible the rover could outlast its original estimates. The last Exploration rover, “Opportunity”, recently woke from its fifth winter to continue trundling around Mars.

There’s more on the “7 minutes of terror” process of landing Curiosity on Mars in our full SlashGear 101 on the subject. With transmission delays back to Earth amounting to around fourteen minutes, and the landing itself taking roughly half that time, the entire process had to be automated as there was no way for it to be manually remote-controlled.

NASA’s Curiosity is biggest Mars mission yet (in more ways than one) is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.