MSL now has a name...Curiousity

[JonClarke]

AS to sample return, it;s simply impossible to learn more today from looking at one sample with a hundred instruments than from looking at a hundred samples with one instrument. The continuing miniaturization of analytical systems makes it almost always a better choice to send more instruments than to bring back samples.

Earth based studies will always give better results than those on probes. There are many reasons. There are more and better instruments available, better sample preparation, the ability to vary procedures, the fact that samples can be curated and analysed decades later using technologies not even dreamed of when a probe is sent. This is why sample return always ends up as the highest scientific priority when strategic reviews are done.

 

[JonClarke]

I had seen pictures of Curiosity but when seeing it next to the workers, you really get a feel for the size of that thing. It is huge! Largest rover for sure, but what about the stationary landers from the past, it is bigger than them? It this the largest lander to go to Mars or was Phoenix bigger (in terms of weight and size)?

Curiosity is the heaviest unmanned payload we have tried to land anywhere. It is a bit heavier than the big Russian Luna landers, and significantly heavier than Viking.

 

[abq_farside]

Curiosity is the heaviest unmanned payload we have tried to land anywhere. It is a bit heavier than the big Russian Luna landers, and significantly heavier than Viking.

Thanks JC.

 

[EarthlingX]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY_7d55vJko[/youtube]

 

[EarthlingX]

http://www.universetoday.com : Best Reality TV Ever: Camera Will Take Video of Next Mars Rover Landing

July 19th, 2010

Written by Nancy Atkinson


This graphic portrays the sequence of key events in August 2012 from the time the NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, with its rover Curiosity, enters the Martian atmosphere to a moment after it touches down on the surface. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems


Now THIS is what I call "must-see TV!" A camera on the next Mars Rover — MSL, also known as Curiosity – will start recording high-definition video about two minutes before the rover lands on Mars, currently scheduled for August 2012. The Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will provide all of us Martian-wannabes with the first-ever ride along with the landing — and this will be a very unique landing, with the "Sky –Crane" lowering Curiosity to the planet's surface. The video won't be live, however – that's way too much data for the spacecraft to send back to Earth at such an important event, but we will get to see it later. JPL provided a description of what the video should look like:


This Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) camera will fly on the Curiosity rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

 

[3488]

Important moment.

Quite a thrill to have watched this live.

MSL Curiosity has driven in the clean room. :mrgreen:

Andrew Brown.

 

[EarthlingX]

http://www.planetary.org : Live camera on Curiosity in JPL clean room all day today

Jul. 23, 2010 | 12:02 PDT | 19:02 UTC

By Emily Lakdawalla

Tune in to Ustream right now to see Curiosity, the next Mars rover, on its wheels in the "High Bay" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [Not much action happening as I post this; there's a lunch break for the engineers until 1 or 1:30.] Word is that some time this afternoon, Curiosity will roll on six wheels for the first time ever (I've heard 2 p.m. Pacific, but it's not strictly scheduled and could happen before or after). This is a big day for any rover mission!

Curiosity on its wheels
In a live webcast from the clean room at JPL on July 23, 2010, the Curiosity rover sits on six wheels. Engineers took the opportunity to take photos of each other with the newly assembled hardware. Credit: NASA / JPL

 

[EarthlingX]

http://www.planetary.org : Curiosity rolls!

Jul. 23, 2010 | 13:56 PDT | 20:56 UTC

By Emily Lakdawalla

Enjoy my extremely low-tech animation of Curiosity's first "steps"! Six wheels rolling on Earth -- let's go for six wheels rolling on Mars!

A quick-and-dirty animation of several screen captures taken from JPL's Ustream webcast of Curiosity's first motion in the clean room. Credit: NASA / JPL / poor quality animation by Emily Lakdawalla

And here's the rover backing up! Make you own *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* backup noises...

Curiosity rolls backwards!
Curiosity rolls for the second time, moving backwards... Credit: NASA / JPL / low tech gif by Emily Lakdawalla

 

[EarthlingX]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO-jGItiXgU[/youtube]

 

[brandbll]

I had seen pictures of Curiosity but when seeing it next to the workers, you really get a feel for the size of that thing. It is huge! Largest rover for sure, but what about the stationary landers from the past, it is bigger than them? It this the largest lander to go to Mars or was Phoenix bigger (in terms of weight and size)?

Curiosity is the heaviest unmanned payload we have tried to land anywhere. It is a bit heavier than the big Russian Luna landers, and significantly heavier than Viking.

What about the Russian Venus landers, i thought those were pretty big.

 

[STARGAZER77]

I'm curious as to what Mars sounds like. I was wondering if NASA plans to put microphones on the Mars Science Laboratory. I would think a lot could be learned from them i.e.:
You could hear the wind besides sensing it.
You could hear dust & sand hitting the vehicle besides sensing it.
You could listen to the sounds of the instruments as well as the motor to determine how well they are working.
You could listen to how the scooper sounds as it is digging into the soil; and to how the drill sounds as it goes into the soil and rocks to determine how much resistance it is encountering.
You could determine what kind of surface the rover wheels are rolling on such as rocky or sandy and if one or more wheels are spinning in sandy soil.
This is all I could come up with but I'm sure there could be other uses.

 

[CalliArcale]

I seem to recall Mars Polar Lander carried microphones, but of course it crashed on landing and so we never got to hear the sounds of Mars. I'm not sure if any other probe carried a microphone, but I'm not aware of one.

 

[brandbll]

I seem to recall Mars Polar Lander carried microphones, but of course it crashed on landing and so we never got to hear the sounds of Mars. I'm not sure if any other probe carried a microphone, but I'm not aware of one.

I remember listening to some sort of sound clip from Hyugens. Jsut sounded like static for the most part.

 

[kk434]

The MSL thread looks quite dead, only a few posts. Strange because it is NASA's next flagship mission. It is very risky and "all eggs are in one basket". I hope this Skycrane works. When Apollo program tested the LEM they built a technlogy demonstartor that had a jet engine to simulate 1/6 gravity of the moon. It was very tricky and Neil A. had to eject once. I hope that NASA tests this Sky crane in practice not just in theory because it feels very dangeorus and prone to error.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Well, there's not going to be a lot of posts about a mission scheduled to launch 15 months from now (NET Nov 25, 2011 on the schedule). Note several posts about the rover's first drive in July above...

 

[centsworth_II]

For anyone who missed the MSL clean room robot dance. (A must see.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfeSNjr8_zQ

 

[MeteorWayne]

It was posted in this thread on July 25th....

 

[EarthlingX]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1noAqa_Ukc[/youtube]

 

[EarthlingX]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJk9dlk-Gzk[/youtube]

JPLnews | September 03, 2010

Teaching a rover new tricks. This week's lesson: hand-eye coordination.

 

[3488]

Also this week in addition to the very positive developments that EarthlingX has bought here.

Testing of the MSL Curiosity Cruise Stage is going very well.

Testing of the MSL Curiosity Cruise Stage.

Testing of the MSL Curiosity Cruise Stage.

I hope to be present at the Cape for the launch.

Animation showing EDL of MSL Curiosity.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E37Ss9Tm36c[/youtube]

Mission explanation animation.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqqBy7C8gyU[/youtube]

Andrew Brown.

 

[EarthlingX]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov : NASA's Next Mars Rover Rolls Over Ramps

September 13, 2010


NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, drives up a ramp during a test at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., on Sept. 10, 2010.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

PASADENA, Calif. -- The rover Curiosity, which NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will place on Mars in August 2012, has been rolling over ramps in a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to test its mobility system.

Curiosity uses the same type of six-wheel, rocker-bogie suspension system as previous Mars rovers, for handling uneven terrain during drives. Its wheels are half a meter (20 inches) in diameter, twice the height of the wheels on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers currently on Mars.

Launch of the Mars Science Laboratory is scheduled for 2011 during the period from Nov. 25 to Dec. 18. The mission is designed to operate Curiosity on Mars for a full Martian year, which equals about two Earth years.

A public lecture by Mars Science Laboratory Chief Scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, will take place at JPL on Thursday, Sept. 16, beginning at 7 p.m. PDT Time (10 p.m. EDT). Live video streaming, supplemented by a real-time web chat to take public questions, will air on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasajpl .

 

[EarthlingX]

spacecoalition.com : Video: NASA’s Next Mars Rover – Extensive Testing Underway

September 17, 2010

By LD/CSE

NASA’s next Mars rover – Curiosity – is undergoing rigorous testing by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

...

Curious about Curiosity?

If so, check out this video that spotlights one aspect of the rover’s extensive test program now underway:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=18416173

 

[EarthlingX]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU_t4rz0jvY[/youtube]

planetsocblog | September 20, 2010

Credit: NASA/JPL. Engineers give the rover lessons in hand-eye coordination.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C56udvHRn-Q[/youtube]

planetsocblog | September 20, 2010

Credit: NASA/JPL. Curiosity rover is put through its paces. NASA engineers run the Curiosity rover through an obstacle course.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDx5AG2RoT8[/youtube]

planetsocblog | September 20, 2010

Credit: Malin Space Science Systems
This video was recorded using one of the flight cameras for the Curiosity rover, the Mastcam narrow-angle camera, a telephoto camera with 100 millimeter focal length. The video was taken in mid-March 2010, just before the fixed focal length cameras were delivered from MSSS to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The cameras were pointed out the window of MSSS' "Canyon View Clean Room," which is a second-floor room with views of a residential area a kilometer away. About this video, they write: "The camera is able to acquire "motion JPEG" compressed video (something like Quicktime). The quality of our initial attempt at a movie is pretty bad (JPEG Quality 50), and in motion shows lots of compression frame to compression frame variance. However, this first test video does illustrate the general capability. In the video below, look for joggers and motion of the trees in the far field to see that it is really changing. This file in original raw format (15 frame Group of Pictures (GOPs)) was about 40 MBytes, which is about a days worth of downlink from MSL (if it were all allocated to bringing down a movie). Better quality will take longer, and bringing down video would not normally get a large allocation of downlink, so it might take a week or longer to get only a minute's worth of video back to Earth." More images from the fixed focal length cameras are available here:
http://www.msss.com/science/msl-mastcam-pre-launch-images.php

www.msss.com : Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Mast Camera (Mastcam) Pre-Launch Images

Images taken during Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO) testing after the delivery of the Mastcams to JPL:

...

Mastcam principal investigator Michael Malin imaged at JPL by the M-34 at a distance of 2 m.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

...

 

[EarthlingX]

http://www.planetary.org : Seeing Curiosity

By Emily Lakdawalla

Sep. 20, 2010 | 14:32 PDT | 21:32 UTC

I've been itching to get back to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to get a good look at Curiosity, the next Mars rover. (I was not excited about the name when it was first bestowed upon the rover, but, like Spirit and Opportunity, it's growing on me, and I MUCH prefer such a name to "MSL" for communicating with the public.) JPL had an event to invite the media to view the rover last Thursday, so Bill Nye, A. J. S. Rayl, and I headed up there to see how she's coming along. Here's a pic of me with the rover; JPL Tweeted a photo of Bill earlier.

..

Credit: A. J. S. Rayl

and much more.

 

[EarthlingX]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov : Laser Tool for Studying Mars Rocks Delivered to JPL

September 21, 2010


The ChemCam instrument for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission uses a pulsed laser beam to vaporize a pinhead-size target, producing a flash of light from the ionized material -- plasma -- that can be analyzed to identify chemical elements in the target. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

PASADENA, Calif. -- The NASA Mars Science Laboratory Project's rover, Curiosity, will carry a newly delivered laser instrument named ChemCam to reveal what elements are present in rocks and soils on Mars up to 7 meters (23 feet) away from the rover.

The laser zaps a pinhead-sized area on the target, vaporizing it. A spectral analyzer then examines the flash of light produced to identify what elements are present.

The completed and tested instrument has been shipped to JPL from Los Alamos for installation onto the Curiosity rover at JPL.

ChemCam was conceived, designed and built by a U.S.-French team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M.; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (the French national space agency); and the Centre d'Étude Spatiale des Rayonnements at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France.

...

The two main parts of the ChemCam laser instrument for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission are shown in this combined image. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

...