Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

[AirDOGGe]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Just use Google and do a little reading, and the information presents itself. I found some of your answers at "Popular Mechanics", of all sites.

I believe there were a few Y-tube videos providing such info in the naration as well.


Here's a portion of the popular mechanics article:

This is the largest planetary spacecraft ever flown. This thing is almost 3.5 tons entering the atmosphere. We're doing a "guided entry." Previous missions have gone in on what we call a ballistic entry, maintaining the same attitude and just flying through the atmosphere. Drag slows the spacecrafts down and they land where they land. We're different with MSL in that we go in and are able to sort of surf through the atmosphere. If the spacecraft senses it's going to overfly the target, it can steer itself to fly lower in the atmosphere where it's more dense. If it feels like it's falling short of our target, it'll surf a little bit higher. Without doing guided entry we wouldn't be able to have a landing footprint small enough to get in Gale Crater.

MSL also has the largest parachute that we've ever flown. This parachute is over 60 feet in diameter. It barely fit in the wind tunnel when we were testing it. Obviously, the Sky Crane is brand new, but every single one of these technologies is all built upon previous missions. For example, guided entries were done by the Apollo program and Space X and Dragon. We're now bringing that same technology to interplanetary missions for the first time.


After we've entered the atmosphere at around 13,000 miles per hour, drag slows us down enough to deploy a parachute at about seven miles up. But the chute can only slow us to about 200 miles per hour. At that point we need to use rocket power to slow the rest of the way. We built what we call the descent stage, but it's just a glorified jetpack. The rover wears this eight-rocket engine jetpack on its back.

The heat shield separates from the bottom at about five miles up, and radar starts gathering altitude data. Then, about a mile off the surface, the rover and jetpack drop free from the parachute. The rocket engines light and slow the rover down to just under two miles per hour. At about 60 feet above the surface, we begin the Sky Crane maneuver.

If I recall previous readings correctly, the supersonic parachute opens at around 1000 mph.

You can see video of the full size parachute being deployment-tested at a lower speed in the full-scale wind tunnel at NASA Ames, just a couple of miles from my home:


(Deployment occurs around the 52-second mark)
[YT]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ola9cG3RgOM&feature=related[/YT]

[SkyvanDelta]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Anyone know what the altitude the heat shield was dropped, what altitude the rockets fired, or how fast it was traveling when all this occurred? I counted 40 seconds from the heat shield deployment until the rockets turn off.

[AirDOGGe]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

I knew NASA should have been more careful where they dropped that heat shield. Sorry Victor. Better file a claim.


Anyway, I just wanted to mention that NASA has uploaded and released their high resolution version of the landing video. It certainly is sharper than the early thumbnail copy.

LINK: http://www.space.com/17242-curiosity...ion-video.html

At the end they show a short close-up clip of the heat shield hitting the ground, and apparently pulverizing Victor's prized tree in the process.

[Victor Archer]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Ya'll know Veektor is up there tending to his time share.. be patient...

Ya B@atards broke my favorite tree....

Who's gonna pay for it...

[C_roundy]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Youtube is too limited. Many videos and/or topics are not available there. GOOGLE is a better tool...

I agree in every way. -But- I still post youtube links on occasion for the simple and important reason that I know my links stand a good chance of still being accessible years from now when someone is trying to read this whole BLESSED site like I did when I started here.

[AirDOGGe]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Curious AirDogge, in general, How and Where did you find such information on the picture quality? I made no attempt to search for it, but I did search youtube hoping to find something and found nothing.

Youtube is too limited. Many videos and/or topics are not available there. GOOGLE is a better tool to search with.

However, I just stumbled across the info while searching for good stuff to read at Air & Space Smithsonian, one of my favorite magazines.

I also found good information at (where else?) the official JPL rover website at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/overview/



Here's the full Air&Space article where I found the original camera info;

http://blogs.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/2012/08/a-tale-of-two-mars-cameras/

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[IcePaq]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Thier first order of business is to get photo's out of the rover in case it has a catastophic failure very early on.

The low resolution photos are first because they are smaller.

Because of the huge latency of the connection, they have to use a "connectionless protocol" and deal with any data issues back here on earth.

[SkyvanDelta]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Curious AirDogge, in general, How and Where did you find such information on the picture quality? I made no attempt to search for it, but I did search youtube hoping to find something and found nothing.

[AirDOGGe]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

I think I found the reason for the low video quality:



"For defensible reasons, NASA decided not to include it (a 3D capable zoom camera).

But another Malin-built camera called MARDI — which, amazingly, was also initially axed by NASA cost-cutters — survived (barely — Malin had to put in his own money), and will film the rover’s descent as it drops to the Martian surface. Here’s NASA’s description of how it will work:


During the final few minutes of Curiosity’s flight to the surface of Mars, the Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will record a full-color video of the ground below. This will provide the Mars Science Laboratory team with information about the landing site and its surroundings, to aid interpretation of the rover’s ground-level views and planning of initial drives. Hundreds of the images taken by the camera will show features smaller than what can be discerned in images taken from orbit. The video will also give fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars.


MARDI will record the video on its own 8-gigabyte flash memory at about four frames per second and close to 1,600 by 1,200 pixels per frame. Thumbnails and a few samples of full-resolution frames will be transmitted to Earth in the first few days after landing….The full video — available first from the thumbnails in YouTube-like resolution and later in full detail — will begin with a glimpse of the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover. The first views of the ground will cover an area several kilometers (a few miles) across. Successive frames taken as the vehicle descends will close in and cover successively smaller areas. The video will likely nod up and down to fairly large angles owing to parachute-induced oscillations.

Many of the images may also be blurry, due to the motion of the camera. "



AirDOGGe sez: In other words, better quality video of the landing is forthcoming. They just upped thumbnails to Earth for now to minimize the transmission time required to get the first photos and video to us as soon as possible.


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[SkyvanDelta]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

I guess the vibration and the exhaust gases of the rockets used during descent would blur an otherwise perfect photo.

[lowpasskid]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

we wiil see alot more as time goes by.
"My smarthphone, a $500 Motorola Droid, shoots better stills than what we are seeing."
strap that sucker to a rocket so we can get some better pictures!
just have to wait seven or so years...

[AAFO_WSagar]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Ya'll know Veektor is up there tending to his time share.. be patient...

[AirDOGGe]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Thanks for finding the video/stills.

Do you think this is as good of a shot as we are going to see, or do you think that later on, we will be seeing a high resolution of the same?

My smarthphone, a $500 Motorola Droid, shoots better stills than what we are seeing.

Your "Droid" didn't have to shot under the conditions that NASA's "Bot" had to...:

QUOTE from JPL as I posted on page 2,..."Many of its first shots are likely to be blurred due to vibration as the rover descends. ".


But they do say hi-red photos were taken, so maybe sharper individual stills will come later. Still You won't see much. They were all ground shots from the rover itself.

[SkyvanDelta]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

Thanks for finding the video/stills.

Do you think this is as good of a shot as we are going to see, or do you think that later on, we will be seeing a high resolution of the same?

My smarthphone, a $500 Motorola Droid, shoots better stills than what we are seeing.

[AirDOGGe]

Re: Mars Spacecraft Curiosity landing Sunday 10:30pm.

The bottom of the page says the "video" can be found at NASA.


Here's their offering. The vid is a series of stills shot from the rover, so all you really see is ground, but it begins with a view of the lower heat shield falling away, and ends with the sight of dust being kicked up by the rockets and one of the wheels falling into view as the rover's legs unfold: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/video...ction_id=18895


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