Post date: Aug 11, 2012 12:39:6 AM
IN SPACE (AUGUST 10, 2012) (NASA TV) - The science rover Curiosity beamed back more pictures from Mars, including what appears to be its rocket-powered backpack crash-landing in the distance, NASA said on Friday (August 10).
Curiosity sends back more pictures from Mars, including what appears to be its rocket-powered backpack crash-landing in the distance.
"We actually selected the rear Hazcam to be the first image taken. Actually, the timing of the Hazcam pictures both front and rear were timed so that we would possibly catch any kind of cloud like this. And the fact that the descent stage flew directly after the Rover was an amazing coincidence that we were able to catch this impact," Steve Sell, NASA Engineer said.
NASA believes the cloud revealed in the pictures may have been produced by the crash landing of Curiosity.
Mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles are exercising caution immediately following Curiosity's jarring, death-defying descent to the surface of the Red Planet on Sunday night.
They plan to spend weeks putting the nuclear-powered, six-wheeled rover and its sophisticated array of instruments through a painstaking series of "health" checks before embarking on the thrust of their science mission in earnest.
The $2.5 billion Curiosity project, formally named the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA's first astrobiology mission since the Viking probes of the 1970s and is touted as the first fully equipped mobile geochemistry lab ever sent to a distant world.
The very delivery of Curiosity to the surface of Mars already has been hailed by NASA as the greatest feat of robotic spaceflight.
The car-sized rover, which flew from Earth encased in a protective capsule, blasted into the Martian sky at hypersonic speed and landed safely seven minutes later after an elaborate, daredevil descent combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether.
Since then, the rover has been sending a string of early images back to Earth, relayed by two NASA satellites orbiting Mars, providing glimpses of a terrain that scientists say appear reminiscent of the Mojave Desert in Southern California.