NASA’s ‘Curiosity’ rover successfully landed today on Mars in a daring ‘skycrane manoeuvre’, beginning a two-year mission to probe if the Earth’s closest neighbour once hosted life.
The car-size, one-tonne rover costing $ 2.5 billion touched down on Mars at 05:30 GMT (11:00 IST), NASA said.
The rover’s descent-stage retrorockets fired, guiding it to the surface. Nylon cords lowered the rover to the ground in the “sky crane” manoeuvre. When the spacecraft sensed touchdown, the connecting cords were severed, and the descent stage flew out of the way, according to NASA.
The landing was an unprecedented feat that involved penetrating the atmosphere at a speed of 21,240 kilometres per hour.
Minutes after touchdown, Curiosity beamed back the first pictures from the surface showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon Sun.
Scientists have found signs of water on the red planet, though it is now a dry place with a thin atmosphere, extreme winters and dust storms.
Curiosity is not equipped to search for living or fossil micro-organisms but it will look for basic ingredients essential for life, including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulphur and oxygen.
Keywords: Mars Exploration, Curiosity Mars Rover
Comments:
How much did this cost? and all we get is a black and white photo from
the 1920's? Way to spend those tax dollars!
Please, this is the United States of America. We do not use metric measurements but in pounds and inches. Not Millimeters or Tonne. Please refrain from using such terms as it only confuses people as we saw in several attempts before where the US and European agencies had a mus-communication that resulted in the failure of the spacecraft. Thank You
My personal prayers have been answered!!!. My family and friends join me in conveying our sincere congratulations to all those brave scientists and others involved in this highly sensitive and important mission. CONGRATS U.S.A. Fantastick job and please keep doing more and more such missions. Best Regards
RK Menon
India
I am willing to volunteer for the next trip to march a one/way/ticket
and stay in march never be back to this plant Earth''
I love how NASA is reliving those nostalgic days of Viking. Actually the Viking photos were better than this one. We've come a long way since going to the moon ;-p
Such an achievement and all some of you people can do is complain??! Congrats to all hardworking scientists!!! Looking forward to hearing more about the explorations :)
Guy Fuller, seriously ? NASA is now using Metric System.. and please don't be ignorant, remember multiple countries were involved in this project and most of them use the Metric System.
Go read about NASA's use of the Metric System G-00-021 ...
Congratulations NASA.
These pictures are early low res navigation photos. This rover is
equipped with some impressive color cameras as well as a 3D camera.
The limitation is the bandwidth between earth and mars, the connection
speed is a terribly slow 18 kb/s, just faster than dial up. Also this
connection is not even active all day due to the positions of the
planets and the satellites sending the messages. Right now most of
this data is being used to check to make sure everything is working
appropriately and we are good to go. Prepare for some stunning
pictures in the weeks to come.
How much did this cost? and all we get is a black and white photo from
the 1920's? Way to spend those tax dollars!
Hey !..wait a minute...
Those are thumbnail pics just to make sure Curiosity landed...with
covers on.
Now, for X'mas you can be assured you'll have enough different
postcards, all in high resolution and true color, to send to each of
your beloved ones.
to end, ....you ain't seen nothin' yet from the Malin cameras onboard
Curiosity, the finest that money(or ingenuity for that matter) can buy
!!!
This is an incredible achievement. Funny (and
predictable) how you can always count on someone
complaining about things like this. This will help lay the
groundwork for us to someday have manned missions to
Mars. In the meantime, we will learn a lot more about the
incredible red planet.
p.s. to Guy Fuller, ALL Scientists, no matter what country
they are from (and that includes all U.S. scientists), use
metric measurements.
Best of Luck to all the scientists of NASA.
Hope your mission may be successful.
Its human big jump of this 21st century. NASA did Weldon work, all the
team members of this project congratulation.
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