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Image Caption: Curiosity Heat shield falls away from the bottom of Curiosity and the Sky Crane descent stage in this image from the MARDI camera.
Watch the video below. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS As NASA's Curiosity Mars Science Lab (MSL) was in the final stages of her flawless but harrowing decent to Gale Crater on Mars overnight (Aug. 5/6) employing the never before use rocket powered sky crane descent stage, dramatic movie-like imagery of the plunge was being recorded by MARDI, the Mars Descent Imager camera positioned on the belly of the rover and pointed downwards. The first low resolution MARDI images and video (above and below) were beamed back to Earth just hours after landing and clearly show the jettisoning of the heat shield moments after it sprung loose to expose Curiosity and MARDI for landing.(...)
Read the rest of Curiosity's Dramatic MARDI Descent Movie (423 words)
© Ken Kremer for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Curiosity, Curiosity Rover, Gale crater, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), Mount Sharp, MSL, NASA, Sky Crane
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Caption: High resolution full disc hydrogen alpha composite of the Sun on August 5, 2012, comprising of 6 images for the disc and 5 images for the prominences.Credit: Paul Andrew on Flickr. The Sun wanted to let us know there was action going on in other places in the Solar System besides Mars. A huge, dark-colored filament stretched across nearly half the solar face on August 5th. Estimates are this filament was about 800,000 km in length! Wow! Paul Andrew took six images to create a composite, full image of the Sun, and below is an 11-panel mosaic by Leonard Mercer from Malta to show the surrounding region with the main sunspots 1535, 1538, 1540 present.
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Read the rest of Huge Solar Filament Stretches Across the Sun (19 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments |
Post tags: Solar Filaments, sun
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Image Caption: This image shows one of the first views from NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (early morning hours Aug. 6 EDT). It was taken through a “fisheye” wide-angle lens on one of the rover’s Hazard-Avoidance cameras. These engineering cameras are located at the rover’s base. As planned, the early images are lower resolution. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech "Welcome to Mars," said Charles Elachi, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., following the dramatic and successful touchdown of Curiosity on the Red Planet at 1:32 AM EDT Aug. 6 (10:32 PM Aug 5). "Tonight was a great drama. We did the landing. Tomorrow we start exploring Mars and make new discoveries every day. Our Curiosity has no limits and we will explore the solar system." Tumultuous and long lasting jubilation erupted at Mission Control at JPL when the spectacular pinpoint landing success was announced and continued during the post landing news briefing at JPL. NASA’s Curiosity Mars Science Lab (MSL) safely survived the harrowing plunge and nail biting descent through the Martian atmosphere known as the "7 minutes of Terror". After hitting the thin atmosphere at 13,200 MPH (5,900 m/s), the robot perfectly executed the unprecedented (...)
Read the rest of Long Live American Curiosity – Now We Start Exploring Mars (718 words)
© Ken Kremer for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 16 comments |
Post tags: Curiosity, Curiosity Rover, Mars, Mars Rovers, Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), MSL, NASA
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Live through the tense moments of waiting to find out if the Curiosity rover made it safely to Mars’ surface and the joy and elation of six more wheels on Mars. UPDATE: Shortly after we posted this NASA video late last night/early this morning of the events that took place in JPL’s mission Control, it was taken down in due to a copyright claim by Scripps Local News. As you can see in the comments below, everyone was wondering how public domain footage from NASA could be copyrighted. Motherboard and Gizmodo uncovered what actually happened in Scripps’ “zealous takedown spree,” wrote Gizmodo. “They have a history of this sort of thing. The video has since gone back up, but it stands a particular egregious example of the way YouTube’s Content ID system allows third parties to shoot first and ask questions later when it comes to takedowns.” Read more about it at those two links. And thanks to Raam Dev who supplied a back-up version of the events that we could post in the interim. His video is below. (...)
Read the rest of Watch the Nail-biting 7 Minutes of Terror in JPL’s Mission Control (0 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 12 comments |
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0 “Touchdown confirmed. We’re safe on Mars!” announced mission control from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory after the Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover landed safely on the Red Planet. After blazing through Mars’ atmosphere at over 21,000 km/h, Curiosity’s unique landing system worked perfectly through the challenging entry, descent, and landing, allowing the rover to touch down and take pictures shortly after. Above are the first two images from Curiosity’s view of Mars’ Gale Crater. The image on the left shows Curiosity’s shadow on Mars. Pandemonium erupted in JPL’s mission control, across Twitter and other social media outlets as the touchdown was confirmed. With the landing, the Curiosity rover successfully made its eight-month voyage across 560 million-kilometer (352 million miles) to reach Mars, landing on Mars’ surface using a supersonic parachute and a jet-powered sky-crane. Curiosity now begins an ambitious two-year mission to search for signs of past or even present habitability on Mars. (...)
Read the rest of Welcome to Mars! Curiosity Rover Lands Successfully! (600 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 10 comments |
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 Globular Cluster M15 from Hubble – Credit: ESA, Hubble, NASA Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! While you start your observing week out by watching the Mars Curiosity Landing, be sure to step outside and view the Aquarid meteor shower, too! It’s going to be a grand week for globular cluster studies and breezing along the Milky Way. Whenever you’re ready to learn some more history, mystery and just plain fun things about the night sky, then meet me in the back yard. (...)
Read the rest of Weekly SkyWatcher’s Forecast: August 6-12, 2012 (2,141 words)
© tammy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: Aquarid Meteor Shower, globular clusters, Nebulae, perseid meteor shower
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