Good advice. Although I think I'll search YouTube for the highlights.Just watch the NASA site, they'll post videos and pictures.
Good advice. Although I think I'll search YouTube for the highlights.
FYI: Did you all your photos in your sig are missing? .... All the blogger icon is still there, but everything else is missing.
The robotic lab sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km), before piercing Mars' atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour -- 17 times the speed of sound -- before starting its descent.
Hopefully it doesn't end like this:
Yes, we both worked on it. Brenda was a thermal systems engineer responsible for making sure the rover launched, traveled there, landed, operates within acceptable temperature zones, etc (an enormous undertaking). She had several subsystem thermal models as well as the overall model of the rover. She also did analysis for several landing zones to help determine where Curiosity should land (including Gale crater where it did land). She was extremely involved and I'm sure I'm not listing half of what she did.
I worked on one of the ten science instruments called tunable laser spectrometer (TLS) as a mechanical design engineer. The suite of instruments is called SAM which stands for Sample Analysis at Mars. TLS is used to detect methane, carbon dioxide, and water (i.e. evidence of life). I designed, analyzed, fabricated, and oversaw the assembly of several key components as well as the final alignment. As with many of the instruments on board Curiosity in SAM, TLS has the honor of being the highest precision instrument of its kind ever sent to another planet.
As you can tell, we're both excited that the landing went very well. All initial assessments of the rover and instrumentation indicate everything is alive and well. The landing was "soft" per specification relative to the rocket blast to get it into Earth's orbit and send it on its way to Mars. I can tell you that the last calibration and check out on late June showed a completely healthy set of instruments as well as the rover. So, that means everything survived being strapped to a rocket so theres no reason to believe that the landing on Mars would have caused any damage. We will know more over the next days and weeks as we begin to wake-up the rover and it's instrumentation.
That's it for now...
Just found out my brother-in-law and his wife worked on the Curiosity.
Another thing I liked about this project is that the majority of the contracts jobs went to the American people which created jobs as well as having some good science and discoveries for the following years to come. Everything about this mission is positive in my eyes from the people/contractors that built it to the mission itself. Winner all round.
It's absolutely incredible the technology exists to do this.
I was also stunned by how the Mars Orbiter was able to catch it.
Nasa did a report once that suggest we actually do have the technology to do this, but it would be very costly. Mostly because we couldn't do this on a long time span... ie... Some changes would need to be applied fairly quickly to prevent and limit the amounts of gasses from seeping out of Mars's current thin atmosphere in the early stages.
We use essential cookies to make this site work, and optional cookies to enhance your experience.