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NASA's Mars Science Laboratory |OT| 2,000 Pounds of Science!

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fanboi

Banned
astroturfing said:
yep.

654px-Mars%3B_Arsia_Mons_cave_entrance_-MRO.jpg
Click to expand...

I wonder what liOHDEAGGODSASSS....

2625960935_eff5a86b09.jpg
 
P

Partial Gamification

Banned
Martian cave exploration is an awsome prospect. I wonder if it will be the mining companies that finance the first expeditions. I think the above cave photo comes from this crater:
apod_image_1207_marshole2_hirise_2560.jpg

It looks like there is a large cavity down there. I'm seeing the whole crater like it could collapse from the cracks along the inside of the rim.
 
D

Diablohead

Member
I can see nasa or some other 3rd party sending a drill drone to mars at some point, it's main job to start digging into a hole and relay data back to something orbiting mars.

Been a while before that happens but cool none the less.
 
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Tom_Cody

Member
joetachi said:
Heck, do we even know if mars has caves?
Click to expand...

astroturfing said:
yep.

654px-Mars%3B_Arsia_Mons_cave_entrance_-MRO.jpg
Click to expand...

Partial Gamification said:
Martian cave exploration is an awsome prospect. I wonder if it will be the mining companies that finance the first expeditions. I think the above cave photo comes from this crater:
apod_image_1207_marshole2_hirise_2560.jpg

It looks like there is a large cavity down there. I'm seeing the whole crater like it could collapse from the cracks along the inside of the rim.
Click to expand...
FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!

This is so exciting to me. Its a shame that cave exploration is probably well beyond our current rover capabilities. Does anyone know what sorts of speculation is being tossed around by the appropriate scientists regarding Mars' underground?
 
P

Partial Gamification

Banned
I think there is a range of expected environments underground. The biochem lab on Curiosity will help better understand the whole martian environment.

A lander on Mars Express called Beagle 2 will also carry the first robotic mole. Mimicking the behavior of the small furry earth-bound creatures that burrow into the ground, robotic moles will drill underground by pulverizing rock and soil, avoiding the need for a complex drill stem. Beagle 2's mole will only have the ability to penetrate less than a meter (less than 3 feet) below the surface.
 
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DopeyFish

Not bitter, just unsweetened
Partial Gamification said:
I think there is a range of expected environments underground. The biochem lab on Curiosity will help better understand the whole martian environment.

A lander on Mars Express called Beagle 2 will also carry the first robotic mole. Mimicking the behavior of the small furry earth-bound creatures that burrow into the ground, robotic moles will drill underground by pulverizing rock and soil, avoiding the need for a complex drill stem. Beagle 2's mole will only have the ability to penetrate less than a meter (less than 3 feet) below the surface.
Click to expand...

But beagle 2 failed on entry :p
 
S

Salvor.Hardin

Banned
Can someone explain why this landing has been so widely lauded by the media and public? While I think it's fucking awesome, I don't recall the media and general public ever being so enthusiastic about anything related to mars. So it seems odd that everyone is singing praise this time.

Aside from the whole booster landing, is there a significant difference between this mission and previous rover missions that I've missed out on?
 
E

ElectricBlue187

Member
Salvor.Hardin said:
Can someone explain why this landing has been so widely lauded by the media and public? While I think it's fucking awesome, I don't recall the media and general public ever being so enthusiastic about anything related to mars. So it seems odd that everyone is singing praise this time.

Aside from the whole booster landing, is there a significant difference between this mission and previous rover missions that I've missed out on?
Click to expand...

dat skycrane.

basically its an extremely complicated landing that somehow went sucessfully
 
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Tom_Cody

Member
Salvor.Hardin said:
Can someone explain why this landing has been so widely lauded by the media and public? While I think it's fucking awesome, I don't recall the media and general public ever being so enthusiastic about anything related to mars. So it seems odd that everyone is singing praise this time.

Aside from the whole booster landing, is there a significant difference between this mission and previous rover missions that I've missed out on?
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This question gets asked on every page. I think these are the primary reasons that the general public has gotten excited about the mission:

1) The whole Seven Minutes of Terror thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki_Af_o9Q9s

I still can't really comprehend that they were able to pull of such a seemingly impossible landing. When the engineers discuss the landing they describe it as lower risk than other options but I still can't fully wrap my head around it.

2) The rover itself is the size of a mini cooper, which is pretty awesome.

3) The rover is powered by a solid block of plutonium giving is much greater capabilities than past rovers.
 
O

owlbeak

Member
Salvor.Hardin said:
Can someone explain why this landing has been so widely lauded by the media and public? While I think it's fucking awesome, I don't recall the media and general public ever being so enthusiastic about anything related to mars. So it seems odd that everyone is singing praise this time.

Aside from the whole booster landing, is there a significant difference between this mission and previous rover missions that I've missed out on?
Click to expand...
This question has been answered a thousand times, especially in the last couple of pages of this thread.

Aside from the entirely new landing system, that was a testbed for the future of how to land bigger and heavier robots on other worlds, this is literally a mobile science laboratory that has an entire suite of science tools that can be used to discover carbon based building blocks of life, amongst other things.

It's nuclear powered, unlike the last three rovers, and doesn't have to worry about dusty solar panels lowering its power generation. It also has the first true color cameras sent to another world. In fact, it has 17 cameras. It took a video of it's landing (4fps). It's twice as large and five times as heavy as the Spirt and Opportunity rovers. Curiosity is about the size of an SUV and weighs around 2 tons. Has an inside science laboratory where it can deposit samples it has scooped from the surface and put them in an oven to heat them up and detect the composition of the soil, amongst other things.

Has a laser that can shoot rocks, heating them up, while a spectrometer analyses the emissions for the composition. The mast cam can also take video. The first time we'll ever have video beamed back from another world.

This is just a small sampling of things. Please, do yourself a favor and go read up on it and/or watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1coV7XqE1M. It's fascinating stuff.

I'd suggest, DrForrester puts a link to an article or two, or this video: What sets Curiosity apart from other Mars rovers? into the OP so we can just direct people there.
 
I

i-Lo

Member
vaelic said:
holy cow, check this panorama

http://www.panoramas.dk/mars/greeley-haven.html
Click to expand...

I can see forever! This picture should evoke curiosity and goosebumps.

Space, our final frontier, and people bitch and moan about the NASA spending. It is as if something good can not be achieved until all the bad has been eradicated which given the human nature is nigh impossible. It also shows how myopic people can be and in this day and age of internet they dare, I say again, they fucking dare to say so, proving their hypocrisy since if it weren't for science and tech they wouldn't have been able to spread their ignorance through the WWW.

I look at this landing and I think: You know how as you are growing up, grown ups or/and jaded folks are always reminding you that it's sweet and naive that you have this great vision for peace, or space travel or just something that'll advance humanity but that "reality" apparently is going curb the idealism. After that, you just become another cog in the machine. These dying dreams and ideals are the reason why we are so held back. Between religion, politics and straight up ignorance, it's a miracle to think that we've made it this far.

Dream big because they are dreams.

With regards to Mars and other planets we'll be visiting in the future (provided war, overpopulation etc doesn't drive to extinction first) there will be a need for real world (and modified) version of something like "Prime directive".
 
B

Bowdz

Member
birdcity said:
Hi Resolution photo from MARDI is back as well. Imagine that entire landing video in this resolution:
Click to expand...

Just a few more weeks. I've lost count of how many times I've watched the compressed descent video that JPL already put of. High resolution should be amazing.
 
Insane Metal

Insane Metal

Member
birdcity said:
They are already pretty sure Mars had substantial amounts of liquid water on its surface a long time ago. They've found many mineral deposits that, as far as we know on Earth, only form in the presence of liquid water. They've also seen clear areas of water erosion along with dried river channels and deltas. They've also recently found a lot of water ice below the surface that melts during the Martian summer and sometimes seeps up to the surface. (That link takes you to a clip from the press conference where they announce this, with animations from HiRISE of water melting and running down a hillside. Very cool.)
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Rentahamster said:
There already is lots of evidence to suggest that Mars once had surface water. Currently the temp is too low and the atmosphere too thin to allow for liquid water on the surface, but there is evidence for frozen water at the caps and under the ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars



Curiosity will only further build on the current evidence and is well equipped to possibly detect signs of past life.
Click to expand...


Yeah, I mean, we know there are strong evidences and such but we never got anything 'REAL' about it. Now imagine Curiosity getting into that crater and finding layers upon layers of ancient soil with signs of oceans or some kind of life form from the past. That would be absolutely nuts.
 
C

ckohler

Member
PjotrStroganov said:
That panorama is very nice. But really guys, are you going to tell me you haven't seen any of the countless and beautiful panoramas that Spirit, Opportunity and even Pathfinder took? Shame on you!
Click to expand...

That panorama IS from Sprit/Opportunity. There haven't been any panoramas from Curiosity yet.
 
C

ckohler

Member
DrForester said:
If there's one disappointment to this project is we won't get any amazing pictures of Curiosity doing it's thing, as there's no base platform to picture it with.
Click to expand...

The engineers have said that it's possible (probably expected, eventually) to use the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera to image the rover. MAHLI is on the end of the robotic arm. It was designed not just to look at rocks but to inspect the rover. It can even look under the rover. It supports color and focus.
 
B

belvedere

Junior Butler
maquiladora said:
They will be trying to increase data transfer bandwidth to about 2mb per second eventually.
Click to expand...

So how does this work? I wasn't aware of my ignorance until now, but unless there's a communication protocol I'm unaware of, this is all occurring via radio? How are images/video/data in general sent this way?
 
M

maquiladora

Member
belvedere said:
So how does this work? I wasn't aware of my ignorance until now, but unless there's a communication protocol I'm unaware of, this is all occurring via radio? How are images/video/data in general sent this way?
Click to expand...

X-band radio via satellites orbiting Mars and directly from the rover to Earth via a high-gain antenna.
 
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StopMakingSense

Member
belvedere said:
So how does this work? I wasn't aware of my ignorance until now, but unless there's a communication protocol I'm unaware of, this is all occurring via radio? How are images/video/data in general sent this way?
Click to expand...

Transmitting packetized data via radio isn't novel (think wifi, cell, etc.). The high-gain antenna hasn't been deployed yet, but will transmit up to 2mbps when active.
 
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