Items tagged with Curiosity
The Curiosity Mars rover now has a license to shoot at will -- the rover can now autonomously target rocks without human permission or control. Curiosity uses ChemCam, a software developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. It is designed to study the chemical makeup of rocks and soil on Mars. It zaps rocks with a laser and then analyzes the gases that are released from the impact. ChemCam has fired more than 350,000 lasers at about 10,000 points since landing on Mars in 2012.ChemCam is now accompanied by Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science or AEGIS. AEGIS and has been used on the Curiosity before, but in a lesser capacity. .Up until now, researchers...
Read more...
How do you land a car-sized rover on the planet Mars? NASA answered that question with eight years of careful planning and around nine months of space travel culminating in the most advanced rover ever touching down on the Red Planet last night at 10:32 p.m. PDT. Score one of the home team. The one-ton rover called Curiosity will now begin a two-year mission to investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life, NASA said. But before embarking on that mission, Curiosity had to survive what NASA dubbed "Seven Minutes of Terror," so called because the seven minutes prior to landing involved a combination of complex technologies never before attempted in outer space....
Read more...
