“If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape,” said Sarah Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “When you consider that we have been working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken, you begin to realize how challenging this picture was to obtain.”
The image of Curiosity on its parachute can be found at:http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia15978b.html
The image was taken while MRO was 211 miles (340 kilometers) away from the parachuting rover. Curiosity and its rocket-propelled backpack, contained within the conical-shaped back shell, had yet to be deployed. At the time, Curiosity was about two miles (three kilometers) above the Martian surface.
Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Guess you could consider us the closest thing to paparazzi on Mars,” said Milkovich. “We definitely caught NASA’s newest celebrity in the act.”
Curiosity, NASA’s latest contribution to the Martian landscape, landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5, PDT, (1:32 on Aug. 6, EDT) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall inside Gale Crater, 96 miles in diameter.
In other Curiosity news, one part of the rover team at the JPL continues to analyze the data from last night’s landing while another continues to prepare the one-ton mobile laboratory for its future explorations of Gale Crater. One key assignment given to Curiosity for its first full day on Mars is to raise its high-gain antenna. Using this antenna will increase the data rate at which the rover can communicate directly with Earth. The mission will use relays to orbiters as the primary method for sending data home, because that method is much more energy-efficient for the rover.
Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks’ elemental composition from a distance. Later in the mission, the rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.
To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance to layers of the crater’s interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.
The mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.
HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and the Mars Exploration Rover Project are managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the orbiter. For more about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, see http://www.nasa.gov/mro .
Contacts and sources:
Guy Webster/D.C. Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Parachuting a couple of billion dollars onto the surface of Mars to check out a few rocks has to be worth every penny. And to see those people at Nasa so happy with their “Hi Fives” (Borat) just warms your heart !
I’m sure the homeless and the poor will also be as happy now .
looks fake – where’s the shadow? A couple hundred million for the stage and the rover, a few more million for the computer/green screen and the graphics; and, $2.? BILLION: to who-knows-where – priceless!
Why does there need to be a shadow in that picture?
There is, apparently, some residual intelligent life left on earth, judging by these comments. I believe absolutely that this whole thing is completely fake, as fake as the “moon landings”. It’s just a well-tried con designed, in an age of financial collapse, to wring the last few drops of blood from the ever-obliging US taxpayer. Notice that we are not told how old Milkowich is, I suspect just into double figures, if that. All these lies are erased by the yearly Kol Nidre prayer, so no-one gets to feel guilty about this BS. In fact it is a privilege to lie to the goyim, and laugh about it later, down at the synagogue.
The people are just complacent and comfortable right now. As long as they keep the people comfortable, it will keep on going. If they push the people too hard, then the people will take back what is theirs and just create a currency of the people. No more taxes on money lent by private institution.
Why did my comment get deleted. Mars has a blue sky. Google it!
Be sure not using vulgar or cursing words in your comment or spam duplicates.
NASA must think that the majority of the public is brain dead or something! What do they take us for? They feed the public these crappy pictures that look as though they were taken with a camera from the 40s. With the technology that NASA has, paid for by taxpayers I might add, you would think that would give us our moneys worth! What are they trying to hide?
Another NASA con. One should wonder of the clarity in the pictures that come through from “Hubble”. I don’t believe it, Perhaps it was the best camera they had when they launched this baby. I mean, it takes a few years to get to Mars doesn’t it?
It might be of interest to some people to you tube some videos on Antarctica. I was watching one the other day and it showed snow and ice to the horizon, then as they kept flying, the landscape was replaced with bare mountains, deep lakes (unfrozen) and an uncannily similar terrain as what has been shown to us as pictures from Mars. I knew after watching this, that I had once again been duped.
I want to believe, but I just can’t.