Countdown - NASA Perseverance Mars Rover - touchdown scheduled for 3:55 pm EST Feb 18
On Feb. 18, our NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover lands in the Red Planet's Jezero Crater, where it will look for signs of ancient microbial life & collect samples for future missions to return to Earth.
It looks like an old timey experimental steam driven car from the 1800's.
This makes me want to break out the Martian Chronicle books and re-read them.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
I'd like more space exploration, instead of less. I've always been disappointed by the slow down after the moon missions. Then the change of focus from exploration to exploitation. I would have loved to see an assembly point in orbit to be able to build vehicles of exploration where we get around the problem of gravity and launches. Or even a working colony on the moon, or something.
Are we risk adverse? Probes are great and everything but I feel like we should have been a lot further along in terms of manned missions to mars by now.
sometimes you just need to damn the torpedoes. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited by this, just like I get excited by imagery coming in from the farthest reaches of space. But space exploration should be something that everyone can rally around and feel inspired by.
The Shuttle was a good premise as a transport truck, but it to me always felt like a piece of instead of the focus of space programs.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Is this the rover that has the mini-drone unit or is that a future planned mission?
Edit: Ah, I see that it does have the helicopter drone: the Ingenuity drone. This is so cool, we are going to have a flying object stationed on another planet.
1) Release safely from the rocket in space and hurl thousands of miles per hour towards land
2) Massive subsonic parachute to slow itself down
3) Use brand new software and sensors to guide itself based on the topography of a brand new planet
4) Break away from parachute using a rocket driven drone holding the rover
5) lower the rover from the drone using a suspension system
6) cut suspension system and drop rover safely
7) have the drone fly away as to not blow up and destroy rover
The Planetary Society’s Planetfest ’21 celebrated Mars and the newest visitors to the Red Planet. Mat Kaplan shares some of his Planetfest conversation with Andy Weir, author of The Martian. We also sit down with the leader of the United Arab Emirates’ Hope mission that entered Mars orbit a few days ago. Planetary Society contributing editor Andrew Jones provides an update on China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft that arrived within hours of Hope. We’ll also join preparations for the landing of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover Perseverance as we hear a media briefing from mission leaders.