NASA's rover Curiosity lands on Mars

[Steve williams]

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

(CNN) -- NASA's rover Curiosity successfully carried out a highly challenging landing on Mars early Monday, transmitting images back to Earth after traveling hundreds of millions of miles through space in order to explore the Red Planet.
The $2.6 billion Curiosity made its dramatic arrival on Martian terrain in a spectacle popularly known as the "seven minutes of terror."
This jaw-dropping landing process, involving a sky crane and the world's largest supersonic parachute, allowed the spacecraft carrying Curiosity to target the landing area that scientists had meticulously chosen.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/06/tech/mars-rover-curiosity/index.html

 

[microstrip]

The USA and NASA should be congratulated, it is really a fantastic achievement - as we said today at home at lunch time, happily there are no martians. Otherwise they could retaliate sending objects 10 times as heavy towards the earth, and in case of unsuccessful landing, damage could be terrible!

I can not imagine the anxiety of the team waiting for the first signals of the Curiosity after the seven minute ride started!

The first pictures can be seen at the NASA site:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/gallery-indexEvents.html

 

[rblnr]

Historic achievements like this hardly get any play anymore. Was dwarfed in coverage, by say, the Facebook IPO.

Worth noting that the unmanned missions, including Hubble, Kepler, Webb, Cassini and now this generate much more scientific knowledge than any of the recent (and far more expensive) manned missions (shuttle, ISS).

 

[cjfrbw]

Should have just dropped in San Bernadino, looks about the same!

 

[jadis]

I'm very happy for the guys at NASA for this great achievement. Hope we can get some more interesting news or artifacts or any signs of ancient life forms out there.

 

[MasterChief]

There is something going on...

http://www.space.com/18565-mars-rover-curiosity-discovery-mystery.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/21/nasa_hiding_martian_news/

It appears the Curiosity rover on Mars has had some exciting news, but NASA controllers have said that they're keeping quiet about it until the facts have been checked.

"This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good," John Grotzinger, principal investigator for Curiosity told NPR.

According to Grotzinger, the data comes from the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which consists of a six-column gas chromatograph, a quadrupole mass spectrometer, and a tunable laser spectrometer. This gives SAM the ability to find organic life, if it exists.

So far Curiosity has done a sample scoop of soil for SAM earlier this month, and NASA announced more samples were going to be taken last week from an area the team have dubbed Rocknest. It appears they have found something very special, but Grotzinger says his lips are sealed.

"We're getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak, and the data looks really interesting," he teased. "The science team is busily chewing away on it as it comes down,"