After a nail-biting entry and descent followed by firing off a few breathtaking images inside Gale Crater, Curiosity is about to begin the mission it was designed so well for. Prospecting for ancient biotic gold:
Category Archive: Curiosity
Aug 29 2012
Incredible Curiosity descent video
Souped up frame rate thanks to interpolation! Yay math!
Aug 28 2012
Curiosity has a really good set of cams on her
Mars Curiosity is like a super hero probe compared to her less endowed peers and this week she began proving it. While I’m not planetary geologist, that looks like the spittin image of marine strata exposed by some kind of erosion:
Aug 18 2012
Did I mention Curiosity has a laser?
And not just any old wimpy office presentation pointer laser, either. No, Cursiotiy’s ChemCam system includes ba serious, rock vaporaizing weapons grade zap gun intended to examine samples at the molevular level. Or fend off tentacled monsters with a thirst for human blood:
Aug 17 2012
Curiosity has a secret
Mars Curiosity is quite a machine, a lander, rover, mobile chemical laboratory and robot geologist. But its designers were human, so hidden in the wheels is a geeky tech-y joke. What is it?
Aug 14 2012
The end of cursioity
Don’t worry, Mars Curiosity the rover is alive and well and on the verge of beginning the mission it was so ably designed to do! There’s every reason to expect Curiosity will perform brilliantly, and that’s good, because there’s nothing much slated for Mars after it. When Curiosity finally seizes up, likely frozen in place, starved for …
Aug 13 2012
Mars rocks and rolls
There’s a bit of a lively debate in geology about tectonic plates and how rare or common they may be. Since earth is the only planet we’ve studied in-depth, the winners of that debate are yet to be announced. But one geophysicist has found evidence for nascent plate tectonics on a certain nearby world, and the …
Aug 10 2012
Curiosity EDL in pics, rover begins its mission
Curiosity is revving up her primary cameras and testing the treads. Soon she’ll trundle off the landing site and start prospecting for Martian gold. I’ve collected a few of the best EDL pics below.
Aug 07 2012
NASA releases video of Curiosity’s descent
To those of you already saturated, I’m sorry for posting so much on this. But I’ve been waiting for it for years, and NASA/JPL is really delivering the goods. There’s a hi-res version of this in the works that chief scientist Mike Malin claims “will just be exquisite.”
Aug 06 2012
Curiosity’s mission
You can’t bring Mars to the lab, but you can bring a lab to Mars! In fact I still can’t quite believe that EDL scheme worked so well! But that’s what Curiosity really is, a scientific laboratory, and here’s a few details on the goals and philosophy behind it.
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