The crew celebrates Curiosity’s rover touchdown in Mars’ Gale Crater tonight.
[SatNews] As the Olympic athletes were pushing their all, simultaneously, NASA’s Curiosity achieved the Mars landing—both required long term goals on Earth…the other on Mars!
Its approximately 352 million mile (567 million kilometer), 36-week journey from Earth nearly complete, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft and its Curiosity rover touched down in Mars’ Gale Crater tonight at 10:32 p.m. PDT (1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6).
This morning, flight controllers decided to forgo the sixth and final opportunity on the mission calendar for a course-correction maneuver. The spacecraft headed for its target entry point at the top of Mars’ atmosphere precisely enough that the maneuver was deemed unnecessary.
In addition, this afternoon, mission controllers determined that no further updates are necessary to the onboard information the spacecraft will use during its autonomous control of MSL’s entry, descent and landing. Parameters on a motion tracker were adjusted Saturday for fine-tuning determination of the spacecraft’s orientation during its descent. As of 6:18 p.m. PDT (9:18 p.m. EDT), MSL was approximately 36,000 miles (57,936 kilometers) from Mars, traveling at a speed of about 8,400 mph (about 3,755 meters per second).
As the final stages proceeded flawlessly…
Sunday, 10:25 PM
Sailing Through the Martian Atmosphere
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory has entered the Martian atmosphere. The top of Mars’ atmosphere is a gradual transition to interplanetary space, not a sharp boundary. In addition, the entry point is not directly above the landing site. While descending from that altitude to the surface, the spacecraft will also be traveling eastward relative to the Mars surface, covering a ground-track distance of about 390 miles (about 630 kilometers) between the atmospheric entry point and the touchdown target. Two tungsten weights will be released to shift the spacecraft’s center of mass and give it the lift it needs to fly through the atmosphere.
Sunday, 10:29 PM
Parachute Pops Open
The parachute guiding NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory to the surface of Mars has opened. At this point, the rover has already slowed down considerably due to friction with the atmosphere. The parachute, which is 51 feet (nearly 16 meters) in diameter, deploys about 254 seconds after entry, at an altitude of about 7 miles (11 kilometers) and a velocity of about 900 mph (about 405 meters per second).
And then it happened, at 10:32 PM PDT
NASA’s Curiosity rover has landed on Mars! Its descent-stage retrorockets fired, guiding it to the surface. Nylon cords lowered the rover to the ground in the “sky crane” maneuver. When the spacecraft sensed touchdown, the connecting cords were severed, and the descent stage flew out of the way. The time of day at the landing site is mid-afternoon—about 3 p.m. local Mars time at Gale Crater. The time at JPL’s mission control is about 10:31 p.m. Aug. 5 PDT (early morning EDT).
