Its down – Landed ! The first images are already being sent back via Odyssey. They are Hazcam images, showing a shadow cast by Curiosity on the Gale surface.; Lots of very happy and excited people in this room ! What an opportunity we have now to explore this fascinating planet.
Mars Science Laboratory Blog
Landing Day
90 m/s Parachute open
Saturday 5th August Landing Sequence
Nominal tones received from MSL. Target location estimated 230 m from centre of ellipse in current trajectory. 10.25 pm Atmospheric entry has occurred. Now 7 minutes to go. Getting very quiet in the room.
Saturday 5th August Landing Sequence
10.15 pm. Cruise stage separation successful. Spin down of the aeroshell successful. Nominal ‘heartbeat’ tones from Curiosity. 5.4 km/s and speeding up 6 minutes from atmospheric entry.
Saturday 5th August Landing Day
18 minutes to entry We are gathered in Building 321, the Flight Operations Centre. Distance = 7200 km Velocity 17, 400 km/h. A final talk from John Grotzinger (MSL PI), he tells us this is the opportunity of our generation perhaps never to be repeated. Steve Squyres (MER PI) reminds us to enjoy the mission. […]
Sunday 5th August. Landing Day.
I get up to a beautiful day in California with humming birds feeding and clear views of the San Gabriel Mountains. We will have a final MSL team briefing tonight at 9 pm PDT. Before that most of us will be having a quiet day. After 9 pm at JPL, there will be feeds passing on information from the spacecraft and the Odyssey […]
Saturday 4th August
Lots of people turning up now at JPL: a mixture of familiar and new faces to me. There is also a collection of expat Brits working at JPL, we exchange news. It will be great to work with new people in the science teams. Some of the people go back to the Viking Lander mission […]
Thursday 2nd August 2012
I arrived in Pasadena yesterday evening, the first thing today is go to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and get my security pass. This has been a detailed process which started at the beginning of the year. Modern space missions are very conscious of security issues – in the case of MSL both of access to […]
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