Curiosity Rover to land on Mars August 5th, Seven Minutes of Terror

The Curiosity Rover or MSL will land on Mars around August 5th, a little more than a month from now. Many people, even some here on ATS, have been scratching their heads on the complicated landing procedure to be used.

Even NASA engineers are saying: "When people look at it, it looks crazy". It certainly does, and we all hope they pull it off.

In this video NASA engineers nervously discuss the landing procedure, which they describe as the "Seven Minutes of Terror"

Thats incredible! Hope it works out for them as they intend it to but there are so many areas that they could fail. Nice vid

I will keep my fingers crossed and toes for another of our brave likkle magic spaceship rovers
I just wish they could put a camera on it so we can see it decend in real time.


Oh and I bet if the likkle rover could speak it would be saying "Wheeeeeeeeee!" all the way down.

S&F dude I love space stuff

The whole thing seems overly complicated. Theres so much that could go wrong and no backup plans to correct failures. I hope they make it though.

Heres a longer animations of the curiosity mission

Originally posted by boymonkey74
I will keep my fingers crossed and toes for another of our brave likkle magic spaceship rovers

I just wish they could put a camera on it so we can see it decend in real time.

There are MULTIPLE cameras, and yes, one actually will make pictures while descent:

en.wikipedia.org...
MSL Mars Descent Imager (MARDI): During the descent to the Martian surface, MARDI will take color images at 1600×1200 pixels with a 1.3-millisecond exposure time starting at distances of about 3.7 km to near 5 meters from the ground and will take images at a rate of 5 frames per second for about 2 minutes.[57][67]

MARDI has a pixel scale of 1.5 meters at 2 km to 1.5 millimeters at 2 meters and has a 90-degree circular field of view. MARDI will have 8 GB of internal buffer memory which is capable of storing over 4,000 raw images. MARDI imaging will allow the mapping of surrounding terrain and the location of landing.[57] JunoCam, for another spacecraft, is based on MARDI.[68]

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