New Mars rover landing tonight
The Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity will be landing on Mars tonight at 1:30am. Mission status at the link below.
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/msl/status.html
Definitely not OT since Michigan is very well represented at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and working MSL.
Also, the Sample Analysis Module on MSL carries electronics built by UofM.
http://www.sprl.umich.edu/projects/SAM/index.php
MSL is about twice as long (about 9 feet) and four times as heavy as NASA’s previous Mars Exploration rovers. It will carry equipment to gather samples of rocks and soil, crush them, and then distribute them to onboard test chambers inside MSL’s analytical instruments. One of the most critical of these instruments, the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite (SAM), carries electronics designed and built by the space Physics Research Laboratory at the University of Michigan.
Space bitches, space.
seems our space program, isn't as dead as some thought. NASA leads the way again.
I thought that was the case.
That, and landing kick-ass shit on freeking Mars.
But yeah, outreach stuff too.
?
/completelyserious
This was just the dress rehersal. Now, they fly the sky-crane back, reattach curiosity, lift off and do it all over again.
August 6th, 2012 at 10:39 AM ^
On NBC.
My understanding is that part of designing the landing this way was to test sky crane technology. As I understand it, they intend to use sky cranes to help assemble semi-permanenet habitats on Mars for the first manned missions.
August 6th, 2012 at 10:58 AM ^
Now Michigan St. recruiting ceases to be international and becomes interplanetary.
Surely Mars has plenty of overlooked, jealous, bitter losers ready to cast their lot with The Danner.