This shows the somewhat crazy and wonderfully elaborate Landing system for the Curiosity rover which is going to touch down on mars August 5.
It's a series of steps with very little margin for error to land the rover in a very sepecific place on mars intact and without damaging the thing the project cost $2.5 billion dollars so lets hope it doesn't just smash into the ground.
Comments
I'm still trying to get my head round how the Sky Crane idea is the "safest" they could come up with. I understand all the concerns about dust clouds, ramps and off-kilter landings, but it still seems incredibly high-risk to dangle your expensive toys off a rocket-propelled platform.
That said, if it works loads of kudos to them... I thought the giant beachball trick from Spirit and Opportunity was bonkers, and they pulled that off with style...
It's a daring and yet lunatic piece of engineering. It almost looks like it was created by undergraduates on paper in the pub. The more complicated you make something, the more likely it'll go wrong. I am impressed with the amount of automation there will be in the final stages and I hope it sends back awesome video footage.
I'm with Pete, the beachball was much cooler.
The beachball was cooler rocket powered crane is a close second though
curiousity is a lot bigger than the others it's 5 times the weight of spirit and opportunity and the size of a small car 900kg it's too heavy for the beachball approach and aerobraking and parachutes are of limited effectiveness in the thin atmosphere of mars
this puts it in perspective
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA15279_3rovers-stand_D2011_1215_D521...
Also this method is more accurate than the beachball approach the landing elipse for the curiosity is 12 by 4.3 miles where as beachball gives 93 by 12 miles
It is crazy with 500k lines of code better hope there's no uninitialized variables
We reckon we've put in 3/4 million lines of bespoke code into our SAP environment... Can't really say that's a good thing though, doesn't bode well for success for NASA if they are trying to copy
YellHibu.Also, I like the Johnny 5 theme with the head, but it makes you wonder where the military grade laser cannon is mounted...
have to be prepared if those damn martians turn up
it made it down and the first image just came in a thumbnail image of the horizon
They're not going to get too much before the Odyssey which is relaying the data is out of range but the news is good the rover is down intact and functional enough to take pictures.
the live feed from mission control has lots of nasa people freaking out :D
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/images/first_images_mars.html
Fair play to them, it was a complex ask but well executed!
Hurahh... civilisation will now entirely be run by complex Rube Goldberg machines! Never again will a journey be started without a golf-ball weaving a complex route through a bookcase full of pendulums and string.
Yeah it was quite exciting to watch the thing succeed and send back pictures
they even caught part of the landing on the Hirise camera
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/673727main_PIA15980-full_full.jpg
You can see it in its shell with the supersonic parachute deployed
There's now avideo of the decent from the rovers POV via it's Mars Decent Imager
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I&feature=youtu.be
It's low res but you can see the heat shield falling away the jerk as it deploys the parachute then the cloud of dust as the rocket plumes touch the surface wheels deploying and then touching down
it's amazing we can fling a robotic mini cooper 500 million miles across space land it using an acme with flying rocket crane and then get pictures of the decent happening back from the rover less than 24hrs after it's touched down
Every day I see more data and pictures from it and it's a real thrill. YAY for science. IT'S JUST SO COOL.