Comments on: Curiosity landing site: the whole mess

By: adamas

adamas — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 09:34:22 +0000

@UmTutSut
imagine if it blew into the MSL and broke something.it would be worse then that lenses cap incident.

By: astronomy round-up: 10 August 2012 | Jennifer Willis

astronomy round-up: 10 August 2012 | Jennifer Willis — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:44:30 +0000

[...] Curiosity landing site: the whole mess [...]

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:23:58 +0000

Blargh (22) said:

The Saturn V wasn’t exactly unprecedented. It was just like the previous rockets, but bigger – perfectly tried-and-true technology at that point.

Not quite. Wasn’t the Saturn V’s first stage the first use of the F-1 engines?

By: Beating Swords into Rockets « Logos con carne

Beating Swords into Rockets « Logos con carne — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 10:00:19 +0000

[...] into it. The Bad Astronomer is a great place to start with anything space-related; here’s a good one, and here’s another. Maki, over at sci-ənce, has a really cute comic. And you can always [...]

By: KAAAAAAAAAAAAHN

KAAAAAAAAAAAAHN — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:52:04 +0000

“click to barsoomenate” HA HA! Nice reference!

By: George Martin

George Martin — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:22:13 +0000

Sorry, just trying to see if a relatively important URL to this site could be disguised. It doesn’t seem that I can cancel the post. Do please approve the prior post and I won’t try this trick again.

http://www.google.com
George

By: George Martin

George Martin — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:16:19 +0000

www nasa gov /mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16015.html

By: George Martin

George Martin — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 23:59:57 +0000

Thanks to Guysmiley @57 above for the additional information which fled my memory. I just took a look at the NASA page for the mission, not jpl.nasa.gov, and the ballast discovery images are now there. The two images are shown in blink mode. (I’m sure Phil remembers a blink microscope from his student days.) When this gets out of moderation you can find the images showing the impacts of the ballast weights at:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16015.html

The caption says the distance from Curiosity is about 12 kilometers. As I now remember, it was not so much the direct line distance, but that they would have to take a “big U-Turn” to avoid sand dunes in the way.

George

By: Muz

Muz — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 23:31:06 +0000

I keep going on about it, but I’m still staggered that the entire landing process worked so flawlessly. I must be getting old, it looked like science fiction when I first read of the concept. Now its science fact that will take a bit of time to get my head around. Absolutely incredible, I’m in total awe of the engineers that made this happen.

By: Guysmiley

Guysmiley — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:33:53 +0000

@George Martin #48: They said the tungsten counterweights came down approximately 1km between each one. The photo showed them in a more or less line. In the briefing they said they’re not too far from the rover’s location but due to being across the large area of dunes that they’d rather avoid and being in the wrong direction from where the mission intends to go they’ll not be visiting their impact sites.