Curiousity Sparks On Mars! [WITH VIDEO!]

The spotlight got stole from The Olympics

NASA does it again

At 1:31 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover completed its eight-and-a-half-month journey from Earth to land on the surface of Mars. The Times is reporting the news as it unfolds directly from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and covering events and reaction from people tuning in around the globe.

The robotic explorer Curiosity's daring plunge through the pink skies of Mars was more than perfect. It landed with spectacular style, said a NASA scientist, describing the first images of its mechanical gymnastics.

Hours after NASA learned the rover had arrived on target, engineers and scientists got the first glimpses of the intricate maneuvers it made to hit the Martian soil safely.

"It's a spectacular image," said NASA research scientist Luther Beegle, as NASA planned to release a fresh black and white picture.

Beegle described a shot that shows the rover and the parachute needed to help gently land it. Extraordinary efforts were needed because the rover weighs one ton, and the Martian atmosphere is very thin, making it hard to slow the spacecraft down.

More images, including video of the landing and beautiful color shots of Mars, will follow in days to come. And soon it will be time to get "down and dirty" and start digging into the red planet's past, Beegle said.

HERE IS THE FIRST PHOTO AS OF:  07/06/2012

Cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday after signals from space indicated Curiosity had survived the harrowing plunge.

"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."

Minutes after the landing signal reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Curiosity beamed back the first black-and-white pictures from inside the crater showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.

"We landed in a nice flat spot. Beautiful, really beautiful," said engineer Adam Steltzner, who led the team that devised the tricky landing routine.

It was NASA's seventh landing on Earth's neighbor; many other attempts by the U.S. and other countries to zip past, circle or set down on Mars have gone awry.

The arrival was an engineering tour de force, debuting never-before-tried acrobatics packed into "seven minutes of terror" as Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph.

In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered the rover to the ground at a snail-paced 2 mph. A video camera was set to capture the most dramatic moments — which would give Earthlings their first glimpse of a touchdown on another world.

JPL Director Charles Elachi compared the team to Olympic athletes.

"This team came back with the gold," he said.
 
The extraterrestrial feat injected a much-needed boost to NASA, which is debating whether it can afford another robotic Mars landing this decade. At a budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is the priciest gamble yet, which scientists hope will pay off with a bonanza of discoveries and pave the way for astronaut landings.

"The wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars," said NASA chief Charles Bolden.

The Epic Mission

Over the next two years, Curiosity will drive over to a mountain rising from the crater floor, poke into rocks and scoop up rust-tinted soil to see if the region ever had the right environment for microscopic organisms to thrive. It's the latest chapter in the long-running quest to find out whether primitive life arose early in the planet's history.

The voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million miles.

NASA's last Mars rovers, twins Spirit and Opportunity, weighed much less and were easier to land back in 2004, cocooned in air bags.

Curiosity relied on a series of braking tricks, similar to those used by the space shuttle, a heat shield and a supersonic parachute to slow down as it punched through the atmosphere.

And in a new twist, engineers came up with a way to lower the rover by cable from a hovering rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords cut and the rocket stage crashed a distance away.

The nuclear-powered Curiosity, the size of a small car, is packed with scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. It sports a robotic arm with a power drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab to sniff for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to measure dangerous radiation on the surface.

It also tracked radiation levels during the journey to help NASA better understand the risks astronauts could face on a future manned trip.

There will be several weeks of health checkups before the six-wheel rover takes its first short drive and flexes its robotic arm.

The landing site near Mars' equator was picked because there are signs of past water everywhere, meeting one of the requirements for life as we know it. Inside Gale Crater is a 3-mile-high mountain, and images from space show the base appears rich in minerals that formed in the presence of water.

Previous trips to Mars have uncovered ice near the Martian north pole and evidence that water once flowed when the planet was wetter and toastier unlike today's harsh, frigid desert environment.

Curiosity's goal: to scour for basic ingredients essential for life including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and oxygen. It's not equipped to search for living or fossil microorganisms.

The mission comes as NASA retools its Mars exploration strategy. Faced with tough economic times, the space agency pulled out of partnership with the European Space Agency to land a rock-collecting rover in 2018. The Europeans have since teamed with the Russians as NASA decides on a new roadmap.

Despite Mars' reputation as a spacecraft graveyard, humans continue their love affair with the planet, lobbing spacecraft in search of clues about its early history. Out of more than three dozen attempts — flybys, orbiters and landings — by the U.S., Soviet Union, Europe and Japan since the 1960s, more than half have ended disastrously.

One NASA rover that defied expectations is Opportunity, which is still busy wheeling around the rim of a crater in the Martian southern hemisphere eight years later.

CHECK OUT THIS SWEET VIDEO FROM ROVE'S!

 

The Hero at Control

On Sunday night when the world was watching the Mars mission there was one man at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that everyone watched intently on the live feeds. That’s right it was the “Mohawk guy.” Known to his coworkers as Bobak Ferdowsi, he was a vital part of the team watching as Curiosity landed on Mars.

The overnight celebrity has been working at the facility for a while, but his cool hair style definitely was noticed by people outside of the Pasadena, California area and they loved it. What most fans might not know is the man cuts his hair different for every mission. The special hair design as seen on Sunday night - a Mohawk with cool stars - was designed for the mission. Plus, this is the best part, the Mission control took a vote to decide if it was a good design.

Please Comment, Hope you enjoy :)