Mars Mission's Fate Rests on Landing

[Nickdfresh]

Is that a genuine curiosity pic ?? .. Am
Still bitter over the marvin the Martian pic lol

I think it's fake...

[Nickdfresh]

Pew! Pew! Pew! NASA's Curiosity Rover Zaps Mars Rock with Laser
SPACE.com By SPACE.com Staff | Yahoo.com – 10 hrs ago

Image Gallery

A NASA rover has fired the first laser gun on Mars to take a peek inside a small Martian rock.

The Mars rover Curiosity zapped a rock scientists are now calling "Coronation" on Sunday (Aug. 19) to test an instrument that measures the composition of targets hit by its powerful laser beam. The rover fired 30 laser pulses in 10 seconds at the fist-size Coronation rock in order to analyze the results.

"We got a great spectrum of Coronation — lots of signal," said Roger Wiens, lead scientist for the rover's laser-wielding instrument at the Los Almos National Laboratory in New Mexico, in a statement. "Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the results. After eight years building the instrument, it's payoff time!"

Curiosity's Chemical and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, fires a laser pulses that last just five one-billionths of a second but deliver more than a million watts of power, enough to turn solid rock into an ionized plasma. A trio of spectrometers in the tool then studies the sparks from the laser fire on 6,144 different wavelengths of ultraviolet, visible and infrared light to determine the composition of the vaporized rock.

Sunday's laser firing was primarily target practice for Curiosity, but early results suggest the high-tech instrument is working well, mission managers said. Data from the test showed ChemCam is performing even better than in ground tests on Earth, they added.

"It's so rich, we can expect great science from investigating what might be thousands of targets with ChemCam in the next two years," said instrument deputy project scientist Sylvestre Maurice of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France.

ChemCam is one of 10 instruments packed on Curiosity that rely on the rover's plutonium power source to study Mars. The $2.5 billion rover landed on the Red Planet on Aug. 5 and is expected to explore its Gale Crater landing site for the next two years to determine if the region could have ever supported microbial life.

[gbranton]

[ZahZoo]

Nice video of the landing...

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

[Seshmeister]

What is a bit weird about is that it must be that everything that the mission control is saying, he is reporting what had already happened 15 minutes previously.

Signals from the lander travelling at the speed of light would have still taken that long to arrive back on Earth.

When people ask why do a manned mission, this has to be one of the main reasons.

[PETE'S BROTHER]

neil armstrong died

[Fairwrning]

Am I nuts or is this a complete waste of time and money.

[PETE'S BROTHER]

Am I nuts or is this a complete waste of time and money.

this thread? no

[Seshmeister]

Am I nuts or is this a complete waste of time and money.

You're nuts.

[jhale667]

Definitely nuts.

[Fairwrning]

We are spending to see if Mars is "habitable"? I understand its a great learning tool but who and when will anyone live on Mars? Lets say the answer is yes..then what?

[PETE'S BROTHER]

We are spending to see if Mars is "habitable"? I understand its a great learning tool but who and when will anyone live on Mars? Lets say the answer is yes..then what?

pollution

[Seshmeister]

We are spending to see if Mars is "habitable"? I understand its a great learning tool but who and when will anyone live on Mars? Lets say the answer is yes..then what?

Are you the kind of person that if back in the day and you were born in a village and no one knew what was in the next valley would you say lets not go and look?

The cost is tiny compared to pointless stuff like US military spending.

Here's another way of looking at it. Would you have said in the 1950s, what's the point in sending rockets into space?

No one then knew that would give you SAT NAV or hundreds of other things, see the lists above.

You would certainly have asked what the point of the huge particle accelerator in Europe was, the US cancelled theirs because of the cost and a lack of forward thinking.

You wouldn't have thought that a particle accelerator would lead to limitless porn and websites like this but it led directly to the World Wide Web.

It's ridiculous to question blue sky science projects on the internet, if you must then you should do it by a leaflet campaign!

[Fairwrning]

I guess Im the type person that thinks about things a little closer to home..The economy is still in the shitter so whats happening 35 mil miles away ( closest Mars and Earth have been) doesn't seem all that important..I wouldn't have a problem exploring the " next valley".. Maybe I should donate that dollar to NASA instead of the homeless vet with the sign..he's probably scamming me anyway.

[FORD]

We are spending to see if Mars is "habitable"? I understand its a great learning tool but who and when will anyone live on Mars? Lets say the answer is yes..then what?

I say we send Hagar. Why not? He's already written a song about it......

Besides, we know that, given the time restraints, anybody who goes to Mars is probably staying there. Especially if he's already in his mid 60s