Mars Rover Scheduled To Land Tonight At 11:31pm MST- Update- Landed!

[moncton golden flames]

Originally Posted by Flacker

Fuel for the conspiracy crowd. Pano location stated as The World > North America > USA > New Mexico

i'll further that.... if you rotate the camera to look down on the rover, the camera appears to be 'floating' above the rover, not attached to anything.

[troutman]

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily...ity-sol-9.html

Commissioning Activity Phase 1B (CURRENT PHASE): Sols 9-?. About a week. Imaging: Chemcam in active (laser) mode; Mastcam panoramas. First driving plan: wheel steering actuator test on sol 13, short drive forward and back on sol 15. REMS begins routine weather observations. At the end of this phase, the commissioning of the remote sensing instruments will be complete.

Intermission: open-ended, but probably about a week. May include a drive to a new location for first sampling, and will include imaging to support that.

Commissioning Activity Phase 2: At least a week, probably more. Major activity of this phase is commissioning of the arm. That includes first arm motions; imaging of all of the tools on the arm; calibration of arm positioning; data acquisition by turret-mounted instruments (MAHLI camera and APXS elemental analyzer). Check out all the mechanical tools on the end of the arm: drill, brush, CHIMRA sieving system. Hopefully this period will include the first rover self-portrait by MAHLI. At the end of this phase, the commissioning of the turret-mounted instruments will be complete.

Next, Curiosity faces a major hurdle: a high-level review by JPL and NASA of the health and operability of the rover. This review must be completed successfully before the mission will receive the go-ahead to prepare and deliver the first soil samples to the laboratory instruments, SAM and Chemin.

The first sample acquisition will likely take a long time -- again, at least a week, probably more.

[GGG]

There was a neat show on Nat Geo last night called Death of a Rover talking about the last two rovers on Mars. Pretty good show.

[Knut]

Originally Posted by moncton golden flames

i'll further that.... if you rotate the camera to look down on the rover, the camera appears to be 'floating' above the rover, not attached to anything.

Not sure if serious...

I will leave it at that as I do not want this excellent thread overtaken by conspiracy nuts.

[moncton golden flames]

Originally Posted by Hesla

Not sure if serious...

I will leave it at that as I do not want this excellent thread overtaken by conspiracy nuts.

i'm not claiming anything.. follow the link yourself and position the camera to look down on the rover. move it all around and tell me if the camera appears to be not attached to the rover.

[Knut]

^ they likely do not use any pictures that's have the camera arm in it. Therefore when they patch together the pictures it looks like there is no arm.

Occam's razor.

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by mykalberta

Wait what, does Curiosity drive itself? Howard isnt driving it?

From the Reddit AMA:

[–]CuriosityMarsRover[S]
Howard cannot get to the controls of the Rover

[photon]

Originally Posted by moncton golden flames

i'm not claiming anything.. follow the link yourself and position the camera to look down on the rover. move it all around and tell me if the camera appears to be not attached to the rover.

It's also missing a 5km high mountain...

The panorama is by some guy, not NASA, and it's been edited to fill in gaps, put in a fake sun and sky, edit out the mast, etc.. the main camera on the mast hasn't take pictures higher than the foothills yet.

There's more accurate panoramas around, they just aren't filled in yet.

http://www.nivnac.co.uk/mer/index.php
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000....html?mod=e2tw

[stampsx2]

Originally Posted by moncton golden flames

i'm not claiming anything.. follow the link yourself and position the camera to look down on the rover. move it all around and tell me if the camera appears to be not attached to the rover.

If it really was a trick do you think nasa is dumb enough to leave that little tidbit out? Don't you think they would have made a fake arm as well? Some people won't believe anything.

[troutman]

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ms...l20120816.html

Mission team members are "living" on Mars time. A Martian day is approximately 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, meaning team members start their shift 40 minutes later each day.

[Huntingwhale]

That's is a pretty good AMA going on over on Reddit right now. Some pretty good insight.

[troutman]

Rover's Laser Instrument Zaps First Martian Rock
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ms...20120819b.html

The mission's Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, hit the fist-sized rock with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period. Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second.

The energy from the laser excites atoms in the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma. ChemCam catches the light from that spark with a telescope and analyzes it with three spectrometers for information about what elements are in the target.

"We got a great spectrum of Coronation -- lots of signal," said ChemCam Principal Investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M. "Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the results. After eight years building the instrument, it's payoff time!"

NASA Curiosity Team Pinpoints Site for First Drive
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ms...l20120817.html

The target area, named Glenelg, is a natural intersection of three kinds of terrain.

The trek to Glenelg will send the rover 1,300 feet (400 meters) east-southeast of its landing site. One of the three types of terrain intersecting at Glenelg is layered bedrock, which is attractive as the first drilling target.

The first Curiosity 360-degree panorama including the mountain
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily.../08171906.html

[Hemi-Cuda]

so humans landed a truck on mars, are driving it around and shooting lasers at things on another planet. awesome

[puckluck2]

Originally Posted by stampsx2

If it really was a trick do you think nasa is dumb enough to leave that little tidbit out? Don't you think they would have made a fake arm as well? Some people won't believe anything.

He wasn't claiming it was a trick or that he doesn't "believe" Nasa...

[Canada 02]

Originally Posted by moncton golden flames

i'll further that.... if you rotate the camera to look down on the rover, the camera appears to be 'floating' above the rover, not attached to anything.

without a mirror try and see your neck

[blankall]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

so humans landed a truck on mars, are driving it around and shooting lasers at things on another planet. awesome

It's awesome, until one of those rocks turns out to be an alien rockperson's baby. Then the rock people come to invade Earth.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by blankall

It's awesome, until one of those rocks turns out to be an alien rockperson's baby. Then the rock people come to invade Earth.

we'll just feed them a hippie to placate them

[troutman]

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily...el-wiggle.html

There was a press briefing earlier today, summarizing the weekend's activities. The brief version: everything is working great including ChemCam and wheel steering tests, with one exception: apparent permanent damage to one of the two wind sensors in the REMS meteorological package.

Tomorrow's drive will be very simple: forward about 3 meters (just over one rover length), then a turn in place of 90 degrees to the right, then a 2-meter drive backwards; so in total the rover will wind up a bit more than 3 meters away and to the left of its current position, and facing south instead of east. The whole operation will take about half an hour

[TSXCman]

Originally Posted by troutman

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily...el-wiggle.html

There was a press briefing earlier today, summarizing the weekend's activities. The brief version: everything is working great including ChemCam and wheel steering tests, with one exception: apparent permanent damage to one of the two wind sensors in the REMS meteorological package.

Tomorrow's drive will be very simple: forward about 3 meters (just over one rover length), then a turn in place of 90 degrees to the right, then a 2-meter drive backwards; so in total the rover will wind up a bit more than 3 meters away and to the left of its current position, and facing south instead of east. The whole operation will take about half an hour

The patience committed to the design of this rover is crazy.

[photon]

A little drive around.

Spoiler!

Spoiler!