Mars Curiosity Rover a malfunction or safe landing?

Mars Curiosity Rover

Do you think the new Mars Rover will land safely on Mars Sunday night?

Fact: 66% of all Mars landing and Fly bye’s have not worked or malfunctioned.

Video -- Mars Rover's "Seven Minutes of Terror" -- National Geographic

The odds are against it. But it will be fun to see if they allow actual incoming transmissions to be televised as received.

artian Landing In Focus:

Curiosity Is Approaching The Red Planet

5 August, 2012

For the moment everything goes according to the plans and Curiosity is preparing to land on the Red Planet in some hours.

Many of our readers have asked about the landing where, when and how to follow Curiosity's descent.

We go through all you need to know to follow the event!

When will Curiosity land?

You can begin with finding out the ETA in your time zone. You can use this time chart to locate your city and check the time of the landing.

Curiosity is bound for arrival on Mars the evening of Aug. 5, 2012, PDT (early Aug. 6, EDT and Universal Time).

Where can I watch the Curiosity landing live online?

You will be able to watch the event online at:
mars.jpl.nasa.gov nasa.gov (NASA TV) jpl.nasa.gov (Ustream)



Gale Crater on Mars. Image credit: NASA

The target lading area is the ellipse marked on this image of Gale Crater. The ellipse is about 12 miles long and 4 miles wide (20 kilometers by 7 kilometers).


Galre Crater. Image credit: NASA

Gale Crater is 154 km wide and is located at latitude 5.4 degrees south and longitude 137.9 degrees east

If landing goes well, the mission's rover, Curiosity, will drive in subsequent months to science destinations on Mount Sharp, outside of the landing ellipse.



Image credit: NASA

Oblique view of Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater, with the original and revised landing ellipses marked.



What kind of cameras is Curiosity equipped with?



Image credit:NASA

This graphic shows the locations of the cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover. The rover's mast features seven cameras: the Remote Micro Imager, part of the Chemistry and Camera suite; four black-and-white Navigation Cameras (two on the left and two on the right) and two color Mast Cameras (Mastcams). The left Mastcam has a 34-millimeter lens and the right Mastcam has a 100-millimeter lens.

There is one camera on the end of a robotic arm that is stowed in this graphic; it is called the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI).

There are nine cameras hard-mounted to the rover: two pairs of black-and-white Hazard Avoidance Cameras in the front, another two pair mounted to the rear of the rover, (dashed arrows in the graphic) and the color Mars Descent Imager (MARDI).

Why does NASA call the landing Seven Minutes of Terror?
The Curiosity landing is the hardest NASA mission ever attempted in the history of robotic
planetary exploration.

During a critical period lasting only about seven minutes, the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft carrying Curiosity must decelerate from about 13,200 mph (about 5,900 meters per second) to allow the rover to land on the surface at about 1.7 mph (three-fourths of a meter per second).

"Those seven minutes are the most challenging part of this entire mission," said Pete Theisinger, the mission's project manager at JPL.

"For the landing to succeed, hundreds of events will need to go right, many with split-second timing and all controlled autonomously by the spacecraft. We've done all we can think of to succeed.

We expect to get Curiosity safely onto the ground, but there is no guarantee. The risks are real."

This is a most see video by Andrew D Basiago about life on Mars (HUMANOID BEINGS AND ANIMAL SPECIES FOUND ON MARS).
It about 1.45 hours long. First two minutes of the video is bad, no picture or sound.



<iframe src="ALIENEVENT 2012 CONFERENCE ANDREW D. BASIAGO, HUMANOID BEINGS AND ANIMAL SPECIES FOUND ON MARS, NOV 15, 2009, LOS ANGELES" width="459" height="344" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

Will Mars landing be killed or shoot down by the 60,000 earth people on Mars now (Alternative 3 Project)?
For more information on life on Mars view the Video list in #5.

Or will the US start coming clean in life on Mars with the Mars Land Rover?

I will post more information on Andrew D Basiago. Mr Basiago is a real Time Traveler and has a lot of information on the subject.

Curiosity has landed safely.

I've heard about us sending people to mars, first time i heard about it it was a lawyers family so Him his wife and 2 kids were sent to live on mars, i am assuming that if all went well there is alot more.

well the first pics are coming out now and heres one



maybe the CIA did send Obama to mars in the teleporter.....

no realy I just forund this photoshop pic of the first one from the rover it was a pretty good one so why not share

whew i was half expecting a justin bieber poster, thank god those signals havent reached there yet.

Wow, I watched that video ... I'd like that part of my life back please. The "statues and creatures" this guy wanted us to see are figments of his !@#$ing imagination. I'm just blown away how terrible his "evidence" was. Appreciate the post though. Never stop digging!

Spheres spark new Martian mystery


http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Video/__NEW/nn_08bwlms_mars_120914.vembedlarge456.jpg

Eight years ago, NASA's Opportunity rover came across strange-looking spheres that were nicknamed Martian blueberries — and now the rover has sent back a picture showing a different flavor of Marsberry that has the experts scratching their heads.

"This is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission," Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the rover mission's principal investigator, said today in a news release.

The golf-cart-sized Opportunity rover used the microscopic imager on the end of its robotic arm to take a super-close look at the spherical shapes. These particular berries, measuring as much as one-eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter, cover an outcrop called Kirkwood in the Cape York segment of Endeavour Crater's western rim.

"Kirkwood is chock full of a dense accumulation of these small spherical objects," Squyres said. "Of course, we immediately thought of the blueberries, but this is something different. We never have seen such a dense accumulation of spherules in a rock outcrop on Mars."

Iron-rich Martian blueberries first came to light soon after Opportunity headed out from its landing site on Mars' Meridiani Planum in early 2004. The fact that they have layers of a mineral called hematite suggests that the spherules were formed by the action of mineral-laden water percolating through rocks. That's how similar spherules formed on Earth, where they're known as thunderballs, shaman stones or Moqui marbles.

Since then, Oppy has run across the blueberries (which are actually gray) many times. A couple of years ago, the rover spotted an unusual spread of blueberries that were so tightly packed that scientists called it a "blueberry sandwich."

Some scientists say the berries could become important in the search for signs of life on Mars: In the August issue of the journal Geology, researchers from the University of Nebraska and the University of Western Australia contend that microbial activity played a part in the formation of iron spherules on Earth — and may have played a similar role on the Red Planet. Spherules with an iron-rich exterior and an iron-poor core could "offer a macroscopic target in the search for life on Earth as well as Mars," they wrote.

Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside

Last week's discovery adds a new twist to the berry investigation. Many of the spheres on the Kirkwood outcrop have been broken open and eroded by the wind, NASA said. The eroded berries show signs of a concentric structure. To investigate further, Opportunity aimed its Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer at the berries and analyzed their elemental composition. The preliminary analysis indicates that the recently found spheres do not have the high iron content seen in the original Martian blueberries.

"They seem to be crunchy on the outside, and softer in the middle," Squyres said. "They are different in concentration. They are different in structure. They are different in composition. They are different in distribution. So, we have a wonderful geological puzzle in front of us. We have multiple working hypotheses, and we have no favorite hypothesis at this time. It's going to take a while to work this out, so the thing to do now is keep an open mind and let the rocks do the talking."

There's plenty to investigate around the place where Opportunity is now: Just past Kirkwood, there's an intriguing pale-toned outcrop in an area where orbital observations have suggested clay minerals are present. That's another sign that the region's geology was influenced by the presence of water in ancient times.

It's been eight and a half years since Opportunity dropped onto the Martian surface, cushioned by a layer of bouncy airbags. Opportunity and its twin on the other side of the planet, Spirit, were expected to last at least three months. Both of those rovers became overachievers. Spirit finally gave up the ghost just a couple of years ago, but Opportunity is still going strong at 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) Endeavour Crater. This week, the team behind Spirit and Endeavour received the prestigious Haley Space Flight Award for pioneering "new techniques in extraterrestrial robotic system operations."

After weathering another Martian winter, Opportunity is raring to go.
"The rover is in very good health considering its eight and a half years of hard work on the surface of Mars," John Callas, project manager for the rover mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in today's news release. "Energy production levels are comparable to what they were a full Martian year ago, and we are looking forward to productive spring and summer seasons of exploration."



NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ed Truthan / North Coast Graphics
A 3-D picture from the Curiosity rover's hazard avoidance cameras shows the rover's shadow in the foreground, and a 3-mile-high mountain in the far background. Use red-blue glasses to see the 3-D effect.



Michael Howard

A stereo image shows the terrain in front of NASA's Curiosity rover. Use red-blue glasses to get the 3-D effect.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ed Truthan / North Coast Graphics

A 3-D view from Curiosity's rear hazard avoidance cameras shows one of the rover's wheels in the foreground, and its tracks leading back toward the horizon. Use red-blue glasses to see the 3-D effect.

Curiosity on the move

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, NASA's Curiosity rover is on the move after completing the checkouts on its robotic arm. Curiosity, which arrived on Mars a little more than a month ago, is about twice the size of Opportunity — and thanks to its nuclear power source, it could theoretically last for decades.

The rover is heading for its first major destination: a geologically interesting spot called Glenelg, roughly a quarter-mile (400 meters) away from its landing site in Gale Crater. NASA reported today that Curiosity "perambulated over 105 feet (32 meters) of unpaved Gale Crater" over the past Martian day, or sol. It has put 466 feet (142 meters) on its odometer, and is roughly a quarter of the way to Glenelg.