Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror- Mars lander, the How

[Trajan]

Yes I saw QW's thread, this is more of the how did it land and thank god it did

I got this link from a guy who works at Cal Tech...he helped put this together.

nice job actually, the 6 minute film goes by really quick, and provides an excellent representation of the landings intricacies and management the combination of timing and moving parts, 14 minutes removed and in many instances commanded by 'skynet' is very impressive....


This is bound to be an under appreciated but brilliant achievement of science, engineering and manufacturing. Nasas last hurrah sadly...


Video: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

 

[Valerie]

In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the red planet's past.

Cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.

"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."

Minutes after the landing signal reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Curiosity beamed back the first black-and-white pictures from inside the crater showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.

"We landed in a nice flat spot. Beautiful, really beautiful," said engineer Adam Steltzner, who led the team that devised the tricky landing routine.

Touchdown: NASA rover Curiosity lands on Mars - SFGate

 

[Valerie]

NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity performed a daredevil descent through pink Martian skies late on Sunday to clinch an historic landing inside an ancient crater, ready to search for signs the Red Planet may once have harbored key ingredients for life.


Mission controllers burst into applause and cheers as they received signals confirming that the car-sized rover had survived a perilous seven-minute descent NASA called the most elaborate and difficult feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight. Engineers said the tricky landing sequence, combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether, allowed for zero margin for error. "I can't believe this. This is unbelievable," enthused Allen Chen, the deputy head of the rover's descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.


NASA rover Curiosity makes historic Mars landing, beams back photos | Reuters

 

[Valerie]

NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity performed a daredevil descent through pink Martian skies late on Sunday to clinch an historic landing inside an ancient crater, ready to search for signs the Red Planet may once have harbored key ingredients for life.


Mission controllers burst into applause and cheers as they received signals confirming that the car-sized rover had survived a perilous seven-minute descent NASA called the most elaborate and difficult feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight. Engineers said the tricky landing sequence, combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether, allowed for zero margin for error. "I can't believe this. This is unbelievable," enthused Allen Chen, the deputy head of the rover's descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.


NASA rover Curiosity makes historic Mars landing, beams back photos | Reuters

CHECKUP FOR CURIOSITY BEFORE IT ROVES

While Curiosity rover appears to have landed intact, its exact condition was still to be ascertained.

NASA plans to put the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover and its sophisticated instruments through several weeks of engineering checks before starting its two-year surface mission in earnest.

"We're going to make sure that we're firing on all cylinders before we blaze out across the plains," lead scientist John Grotzinger said.

The rover's precise location had yet to be determined, but NASA said it came to rest in its planned landing zone near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of a vast impact basin called Gale Crater, in Mars' southern hemisphere.

Launched on November 26 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the robotic lab sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km), before piercing Mars' thin atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour -- 17 times the speed of sound -- and starting its descent.

Encased in a protective capsule-like shell, the craft utilized a first-of-its kind automated flight-entry system to sharply reduce its speed.

Then the probe rode a huge, supersonic parachute into the lower atmosphere before a jet-powered backpack NASA called a "sky crane" carried Curiosity most of the rest of the way to its destination, lowering it to the ground by nylon tethers.

'SEVEN MINUTES OF TERROR'

When the rover's wheels were planted firmly on the ground, the cords were cut and the sky crane flew a safe distance away and crashed.

The sequence also involved 79 pyrotechnic detonations to release exterior ballast weights, open the parachute, separate the heat shield, detach the craft's back shell, jettison the parachute and other functions. The failure of any one of those would have doomed the landing, JPL engineers said.

NASA sardonically referred the unorthodox seven-minute descent and landing sequence as "seven minutes of terror."

With a 14-minute delay in the time it takes for radio waves from Earth to reach Mars 154 million miles (248 million km) away, NASA engineers had little to do during Curiosity's descent but anxiously track its progress.

By the time they received radio confirmation of Curiosity's safe landing, relayed to Earth by a NASA satellite orbiting Mars, the craft already had been on the ground for seven minutes.

NASA engineers said the intricate and elaborate landing system used by Curiosity was necessary because of its size and weight.

Over twice as large and five times heavier than either of the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity that landed on Mars in 2004, Curiosity weighed too much to be bounced to the surface in airbags or fly itself all the way down with rocket thrusters -- systems successfully used by six previous NASA landers, engineers said.

Curiosity is designed to spend the next two years exploring Gale Crater and an unusual 3-mile- (5 km-) high mountain consisting of what appears to be sediments rising from the crater's floor.

Its primary mission is to look for evidence that Mars - the planet most similar to Earth - may have once hosted the basic building blocks necessary for microbial life to evolve.

The rover comes equipped with an array of sophisticated instruments capable of analyzing samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beaming results back to Earth.

 

[Care4all]

yea!

 

[whitehall]

You gotta have some drama or it ain't news.

 

[freedombecki]

Yes I saw QW's thread, this is more of the how did it land and thank god it did

I got this link from a guy who works at Cal Tech...he helped put this together.

nice job actually, the 6 minute film goes by really quick, and provides an excellent representation of the landings intricacies and management the combination of timing and moving parts, 14 minutes removed and in many instances commanded by 'skynet' is very impressive....


This is bound to be an under appreciated but brilliant achievement of science, engineering and manufacturing. Nasas last hurrah sadly...


Video: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Thanks, Trajan!

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oLaC1VYoTM"]NASA Mars Rover Landing: Curiosity Lands, Beams Back Pictures of Mars Surface - YouTube[/ame]

This video has been approved by Rosa
​

 

[ScienceRocks]

This is when humanity is at its best. Too bad we spend so much on when he's at his worse(800 billion/year), while bitching about this. Need far more of this and less of the other.


Popular Science | New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

 

[ScienceRocks]

Mars rover Curiosity beams back images showing its descent
August 7, 2012

Enlarge

This color thumbnail image was obtained by NASA's Curiosity rover during its descent to the surface of Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The image was obtained by the Mars Descent Imager instrument known as MARDI and shows the 15-foot (4.5-meter) diameter heat shield when it was about 50 feet (16 meters) from the spacecraft. It was obtained two and one-half minutes before touching down on the surface of Mars and about three seconds after heat shield separation. It is among the first color images Curiosity sent back from Mars. The resolution of all of the MARDI frames is reduced by a factor of eight in order for them to be promptly received on Earth during this early phase of the mission. Full resolution (1,600 by 1,200 pixel) images will be returned to Earth over the next several months as Curiosity begins its scientific exploration of Mars. The original image from MARDI has been geometrically corrected to look flat. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

(Phys.org) -- Earlier today, just hours after NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars, a select group of images taken by the onboard Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, were beamed back to Earth. The 297 color, low-resolution images, provide a glimpse of the rover's descent into Gale Crater. They are a preview of the approximately 1,504 images of descent currently held in the rover's onboard memory. When put together in highest resolution, the resulting video is expected to depict the rover's descent from the moment the entry system's heat shield is released through touchdown.

"The image sequence received so far indicates Curiosity had, as expected, a very exciting ride to the surface," said Mike Malin, imaging scientist for the Mars Science Lab mission from Malin Space Systems in San Diego. "But as dramatic as they are, there is real other-world importance to obtaining them. These images will help the mission scientists interpret the rover's surroundings, the rover drivers in planning for future drives across the surface, as well as assist engineers in their design of forthcoming landing systems for Mars or other worlds."

Mars rover Curiosity beams back images showing its descent