13 ms·
This is what Curiosity saw as it landed on Mars
- biot 14y agoI'd love to see the video from the viewpoint of the sky crane.
- ghshephard 14y agoI can't wait to see the higher definition videos. Also - there was quite a bit of dust being blown around there. It will be interesting to see if there is any followup as to whether the SkyCrane maneuver is really required, or, whether in the future, we can land directly on rocket engines. Particularly with the Plutonium power supply - no need to be concerned about solar cells getting covered in dust. Also - I seem to recall that there can be fairly significant dust storms on mars anyways - so it's not as though landing without rocket engines means that the Rover will be immune from getting struck by pebbles/rockets/dust.
- chucknelson 14y agoIt does seem like there was a lot of dust kicking around. Was there anything said yet about if that was more or less dust than they expected? Maybe they don't even know how much dust is on the rover yet?
- papalalu 14y agothey seemed to be expecting dust on the hazcams, which i think i remember them saying (it was very early..) still had covers on them for the first shots.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoClear covers though, in case they didn't pop off as expected. Clever! Somewhat related, and perhaps my favorite facepalm moment in space probe history: "...the titanium lens cap on Venera 14 landed precisely on the area which was targeted by the soil compression probe." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera#Venera_camera_failures_and_success http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera#Venera_camera_failures_a...)
- dhughes 14y agoGood idea, dust is one thing but imagine if it was wet and warm enough for mud!
- amock 14y agoA couple of people from the JPL team talked about why they used the sky crane rather than other methods and they mentioned that the amount of dust caused by using rockets all the way down would cause issues for the rover. So it seems like some dust is ok but too much would cause enough problems that the sky crane is worth it.
- prawn 14y agoMight they want to minimise interference with the layers of dust/dirt on the ground, where possible? Probably not - maybe that's akin to explorers worrying about longboats pushing into the sand when they reached a beach...
- simcop2387 14y agoI think it's mostly that they wanted to minimize any clouds from causing it to think it's closer to the ground than it is, and to keep the instruments from getting covered/clogged on landing.
- amock 14y agoThey plan on driving a significant distance, so I don't think they're too worried about contamination of the landing site. I think the real issue is that they have many sensitive instruments and protecting against very small high velocity particles is difficult.
- fjarlq 14y agoAndrew Bingham, the engineer of the hazcam dust covers, explains in detail: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=29612.msg938852#msg938852 http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=29612.msg93... "These dust covers were one of the last things added to the rover. The MSL HazCams are build-to-print copies of the MER HazCams. On MER, the cameras were protected inside the lander, and in over 10 rover-years on the ground they haven't seen dust building up enough to be worrysome. The Skycrane system was supposed to reduce the plume ground pressure during landing to the point where dust wouldn't be an issue for MSL." "But after Phoenix landed and everyone saw the pictures of pebbles ON TOP OF the pads on the bottom of the lander legs, and the legs themselves coated with a sticky looking layer of dust, some concerned folks looked at the issue more closely. It turned out there is a core flow in the Mars Lander Engines on the descent stage that stays strong all the way to the surface, even hanging at the end of the skycrane. And that can kick up a lot of dust+reaction products during the skycrane maneuver, some of which would go back towards the rover. There was a review of hardware in danger of being coated with "sticky" dust; everything was determined to be dust tolerant EXCEPT the HazCams."
- ars 14y agoIt's not just dust - the rockets would dig a hole in the ground. They were worried about getting stuck.
- goodcanadian 14y agoIt is my understanding that it is more about reducing the area that was affected by the rocket exhaust. The more area you mess up, the further you have to drive to find pristine surface. Yes, dust was stirred up over a small area, but if you took the rockets all the way down, you would disturb a much larger area, and probably change the surface chemistry around the landing site.
- tterrace 14y agoWhat's happening at the beginning there with that disc-like object that looks like it's free falling towards the surface? Edit: ah, the Youtube description says the beginning part is the heatshield separating.
- kmm 14y agoFrom the Wikipedia page[1], I would say it was the heat shield. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory
- jessriedel 14y agoYea, that's why the video starts when it does. Before it comes off, the heat-shield is blocking the downward-facing camera.
- eupharis 14y agoThe success of NASA in putting landers/rovers on Mars is spectacular. Maybe not in absolute terms but... NASA = 7 successes everyone else = failure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Timeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Timeline
- malkia 14y agoI think it saw this - http://www.alicesastroinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Curiosity+killed+the+cat.+source+smosh+facebook+page_06d5f5_3980829.jpg http://www.alicesastroinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Cu...
- rsanchez1 14y agoThis is so cool.
- jessriedel 14y agoWhen does the parachute detach? When is the sky crane activated? Is the cloudy stuff at the end of the video just dust kicked up by the rover, or an existing cloud (of dust)? Also, I would love to see some image stabilization applied. EDIT: Answered! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4349125 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4349125
- skeletonjelly 14y agohttp://i.imgur.com/hFoHy.jpg http://i.imgur.com/hFoHy.jpg The cloudy stuff is dust from the powered descent. The top bit lowered the MSL down via cables which were 20m long, so the distance was short enough to blow up the dust but far away enough to not cause too much disturbance (they were worried about damaging the MSL)
- jessriedel 14y agoYea, I know the general idea. You're probably right, but how can you tell part of the dust wasn't already there?
- skeletonjelly 14y agoDust from where? Earth? The MSL is assembled in a clean room. You can see how much dust was stirred up in the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I&feature=g-wl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I&feature=g-wl
- jessriedel 14y agoThere are dust storms on Mars, even with its thin atmosphere. I'm not sure why you linked me to the original post.
- skeletonjelly 14y agoThe image? Referring to this: > When does the parachute detach? When is the sky crane activated?
- alister 14y agoA nice play by play of the landing culled from the YouTube comments (attributed to "flyhighj65"): 0:15 - Obviously heat shield separation ~0:25 to 0:30 - Back shell separation and powered flight 0:31 to 0:38 - The rover banks to move towards the upper left corner of the screen (camera looks opposite direction of motion) 0:38 to 0:41 - The rover banks the opposite direction and stops its horizontal motion to drop straight down ~0:47 - Skycrane maneuver begins 0:48 - Wheels deploy (top left corner of screen) Touchdown is shortly after the video ends Just as aside, it's amazing that people spend significant effort making intelligent remarks on YouTube (such as the above) only to see it get buried in a sea of inane comments. (It's already at 1,380 comments for this Mars video.)
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoIt's a shame YouTube don't make YouTube comments hierarchical. It would probably help.
- jrabone 14y agoIt's a shame they don't just give up on comments completely. With rare exceptions like this one, they add nothing.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoAs they stand currently, yes. I feel like making a blog post about it.
- theorique 14y agoBut the YouTube community loves to participate ;)
- omarchowdhury 14y agoYouTube comments are the funniest on the Internet, this is fact.
- 14y ago
- tsahyt 14y agoAgain, congratulations to the team responsible for that at NASA! Space exploration has advanced science like no other area. What really rubs me the wrong way are some of those Youtube comments that go like "Why spend so much money on NASA?". Clearly, the spendings on NASA are minuscule compared to what the US spends on it's military or on the banks. That's a rather sad fact.
- marvin 14y agoThere was a discussion on Reddit about the instrumentation on MER - specifically that every concievable scientific instrument is on the rover, but no HD video camera or microphone. Apparently, the reasoning behind this is that these things are scientifically uninteresting. But imagine the PR benefit of getting full-motion video and audio from Mars. Even if we don't learn anything interesting from this, the media effect would have been tremendous. People could finally see video and sound on the evening news, in HD...almost like being on Mars. It's too bad the MER team wasn't willing to do this, seems like it would have been a relatively cheap addition to the project. But don't get me wrong, this is still very, very cool.
- mtgx 14y agoThat's an interesting take. But HD video would be slower to transfer from Mars to Earth as well, wouldn't it? Although it might not matter since it's not like we have to watch everything live 24/7.
- joeyh 14y agoHD video would also be competing with science data for both storage and transfer time. If you read the blog of the MER driver at http://marsandme.blogspot.com/ http://marsandme.blogspot.com/ you can see this tension already play out sometimes, both in scheduling nice panoramic pictures and managing the data storage until a transfer window opens. Science normally wins. :) One of the surprising thing to me about the internet response to curiosity is that I've seen many commenters who seem to assume we can stream live HD video from Mars; some expected it to somehow manage this feat even while landing. But really, Curiosity talks directly to Earth at only 32kbps, and has around 16 minutes per day of high-bandwidth (2 mbps or less) communication with the Mars orbiters.
- Achshar 14y agoIf i remember correctly, rover has a 720p video camera that records 10fps. And considering the speed of the movement of camera or robotic arm, any higher fps would have been redundant. I don't know about microphone though. Plus there is a novelty factor. The first full HD 3d 60fps video with 6 channel sound will probably be the most popular YouTube video of the year. But that's it, no one would watch the second video because all of it would be same. largely because rovers travels very slowly and also because it's just rocks and dust, just like any desert here on earth. The cost of the added weight and volume of more capable camera for just one popular video is not justified IMO.