What is the Latest Rover on Mars and Who Helped Make it Happen?

[Drakkith]

7 minutes of terror turned into 7 minutes of triumph! We have the latest and greatest rover on Mars as we speak! Congratulations to NASA and everyone else that had a hand in building and delivering Curiosity to the red planet!

Read more here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120805c.html

 

[Doc Al]

Yay! So far, so good.

 

[Danger]

Did it kill a cat when it landed?

 

[Drakkith]

Did it kill a cat when it landed?

Your sense of humor is like my roomates, more dangerous to my health than curiosity is to a cat!

 

[Danger]

Your sense of humor is like my roomates, more dangerous to my health than curiosity is to a cat!

I don't know whether that's good or bad, but... thanks... I think...

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Someone knows how to do it.
No one knows how to do it.

 

[DennisN]

An amazing feat of engineering!
There are already some black/white photos published here: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/
Mars Science Laboratory homepage: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
NASA said there will be color photos and movies coming later in the gallery. I hope the mission will be a continued success.

Image: Looking Back at the Crater Rim. (link)

 

[edward]

Hi rise captured curiosity decent:

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/hirise.jpg

 

[Alesak]

I wonder, what colour is sky going to have in images from other cameras? Red or blue?

And if I was suddenly teleported without any suit on the surface of the Mars, what colour would I see, before I died horrible death?

Google doesn't find any reliable answer to this.

 

[Drakkith]

I wonder, what colour is sky going to have in images from other cameras? Red or blue?

And if I was suddenly teleported without any suit on the surface of the Mars, what colour would I see, before I died horrible death?

Google doesn't find any reliable answer to this.

The pictures from the wikipedia article on Mars vary in color from bluish, to reddish, to a dirty brown. I'd guess it depends on the quality of the air at the time. Lots of dust in the air would make it reddish-brown probably.

 

[lpetrich]

iPhone processor way outguns Mars Curiosity rover's | Crave - CNET
What Powers the Mars Curiosity Rover? | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
Curiosity rover - Wikipedia

• CPU: 200-MHz RAD750 (2001), a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC 750 (1997)
• EEPROM: 256 KB
• RAM: 256 MB
• Flash: 2 GB

EEPROM = electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (ROM)

Rather behind a typical present-day smartphone, but then again, most smartphones aren't designed to survive big ionizing-radiation does.

Spirit and Opportunity have (Mars Exploration Rover):

• CPU: 20-MHz RAD6000 (1994), a rad-hard version of IBM's RISC Single Chip, a version of POWER1 (RS/6000: 1990), much like PowerPC 601
• EEPROM: 3 MB
• RAM: 128 MB
• Flash: 256 MB

Numerous other spacecraft have flown the RAD6000 and RAD750 chips.

The RAD750 can survive temperatures between -55 C and 125 C, and ionizing-radiation dose of a million rads (10,000 gray). More ordinary chips can survive only a thousand rads, and that is a lethal whole-body dose for us (Rad (unit)).Curiosity, the other three Mars rovers, and numerous other spacecraft have run the VxWorks proprietary real-time operating system. I don't think that their designers would make them Windows, for obvious reasons.

 

[PhilDSP]

I wonder, what colour is sky going to have in images from other cameras? Red or blue?

The engineers handling the first color photographs from the first Viking landing made a mistake in calibrating the colors because they initially assumed the sky would be blue like it is on Earth. A day or so later they realized and corrected the mistake. On Mars, sunsets and sunrises are blueish while the sky appears reddish during the day (discounting the possible effects of dust in the air).

 

[Alesak]

The engineers handling the first color photographs from the first Viking landing made a mistake in calibrating the colors because they initially assumed the sky would be blue like it is on Earth. A day or so later they realized and corrected the mistake. On Mars, sunsets and sunrises are blueish while the sky appears reddish during the day (discounting the possible effects of dust in the air).

Thanks, I've found this, which I think settles it.

The NASA-hiding-true-colors-of-Mars conspiracy was one of the funniest conspiracies.

 

[lpetrich]

About Mars colors: http://discovermagazine.com/2004/dec/color-of-mars/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C= Is Mars reddish or yellowish?

 

[Alesak]

There seem to be true color cameras on Curiosity.

Like this.

So it probably means no filter magic will be necessary now.

 

[DeepSpace9]

Has anyone seen the picture with the blob in the background? Than curiosity took another picture in the same direction, and it was gone.

 

[surajt88]

http://assets.diylol.com/hfs/cee/08a/248/resized/history-channel-alien-guy-meme-generator-blob-in-the-background-aliens-bf2a89.jpg

On a more serious note, the mystery was solved.

 

[Borg]

Heat shield striking the ground
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crnhjnpgTTo

Curiosity landing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb8RPbLU9cU

 

[Dotini]

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy has now been used for the first time in interplanetary exploration:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/19aug_curiosity3/

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

 

[Drakkith]

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy has now been used for the first time in interplanetary exploration:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/19aug_curiosity3/

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

Nice! According to the article the signal to noise ratio of the instrument is even better on Mars than it is on Earth.

 

[surajt88]

Curiosity suffers its first glitch. It got its wind sensor damaged possibly by debris thrown up during the powered descent. Not a major damage though.