July 18th, 2012
10:03 AM ET
Photos: Exploring Mars
We are pumped for the landing of Curiosity, the biggest rover yet that NASA has sent to Mars. Curiosity is scheduled to land at 1:31 a.m. ET on August 6 (that's 10:31 p.m. PT on August 5).
No spacecraft has ever landed in this way before. The 2,000-pound rover, with a cost totaling around $2.5 billion, will use a "sky crane touchdown system" to get itself safely (we hope) to the Martian surface. This popular video "Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror" illustrates the process.
Curiosity will make its way to Gale Crater, which houses several miles of sediment for the rover to explore.
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People in Orbit
Cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov
Expedition 36 Commander
Expedition 36 Commander
Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin
Expedition 36 Flight Engineer
Expedition 36 Flight Engineer
Cosmonaut Chris Cassidy
Expedition 36 Flight Engineer
Expedition 36 Flight Engineer
Contributors
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Elizabeth Landau
Writer/Producer -
Sophia Dengo
Senior Designer
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What exactly is different and significant (i.e. better) about this mission/landing than the ones I remember from my youth? Am I confused? I was pretty sure we've done this before, right?
DOPE!!!
The irony of the naysayers comments are that we Americans just can't afford it..nor do we have the will........Well the Chinese have the money, are developing the technology and have the national will for excellence. So there won't be little green men to welcomeus should America ever get to Mars. They will greet us in Mandarin!
I guarantee if China ever says they are sending men to Mars the U.S. will make sure they get their first. Which is why I wish China would announce a Mars mission because it would actually push the U.S to get there.
The U.S. has the money and technology to get to Mars, they just don't use the money towards space exploration, instead we use the money for useless wars and bank bailouts.
If is there anyone capable of "landing" on Mars, that will be NASA. After the moon, Mars it will be our next destination out of the Earth. All the world is waiting for that, as all the world was waiting for a man on the moon in the 60's. It will be another unifiying step for all the mankind..and we are needed for such a moment...our world is coming to an end sooner than we think and we need an alternative. And a unifying moment will be a celebration for all the human people.
I dont see anything "This Gallery has expired"
Have they forgotten to brush all alien structures out of the pictures as they do in general, so they had to set them all offline?
Se nota que esas fotos son falsas...Que se lo crea el que quiera, pero Yo no.
ah y no digo que no hallan llegado a Marte, pero las fotos no son de alla.
The final photo of the Earth/moon system 88M miles away is profoundly surreal. Wow.
Tell Quaid to watch out for Richter and Cohaagen.
Maybe this is how our ancestors felt when they started sending probes from Mars to the little blue marble closer to the sun. They knew their planet was dying and needed to find someplace safe. They must have been terrified when the first probes sent back images of dinosaurs.
Haunting to see landscapes such as mountain ranges on another planet. We are really lucky to be living in this time of early exploration. My only frustration is that I won't be here in a few hundred years to see how far we have come.
My pseudonym aside, I grew up watching Star Trek and Total Recall, and I can't wait until there is a Mars colony. A real, actual colony where pioneers raise their families, not just a research station of some sort. If it happens in my lifetime, I'll probably never be able to go there (I'll be too old and feeble), but I want to see it happen!
While a colony on Mars is somewhat attractive as a fallback in case something fatal happens to Earth, getting a useful colony going is daunting. The cost of resupply from Earth is so large that it really needs to be almost completely self sufficient from the start.
How about we first try to establish a totally self sufficient colony on the desert highlands of Antarctica? That would be a lot easier, but still very unlikely.
Good Luck Curiosity! God Speed! Love the images!
What amazing pictures!
Way to go NASA.
I have always wondered...let's say ghosts are real for a second. IF someone died, say a future astronaut, on Mars in some crash, would he be the most bored ghost ever? What would you haunt? Who would you haunt? Would TAPS fly to mars and try to make contact?
Somebody has been watching too much television.
Why would a ghost be stuck on Mars anyway?
I like the idea of the space station and going back to the moon, but I think at this stage going to Mars is a waste of money. When they figure out how to get there faster then go for it, but at this time it doesn't make sense.
It's either "get there faster" or "get there efficiently". Right now, we want to lean towards the latter.
Although I agree with you on your reasoning, I don' believe that there will be ANY lunar or Martian expeditions by humans for quite a long time. Such things require financial and politcal stability on earth. Right now we've got none of that.
I beg to differ. IMO the manned space program is a huge waste of money. Almost everything that can be done with manned missions could be done for an order of magnitude less money with unmanned missions. The space station does nothing useful. The shuttle program was useful for repairing Hubble. But if we hadn't had the shuttle we could probably have created an unmanned mission to fix it. Or we could have put up a replacement Hubble for less than the cost of the manned program.
Unmanned missions all over the solar system will teach us much more than anything putting people up there can do now.
*Someday* we may find something out there that is so compelling that we can justify a manned mission. (E.g. If we find a city full of little green people who invite us to dinner.)
Right now the manned space program is like the Blue Angels – just a very expensive PR program. (But *way* more expensive!)
Manned space programs has brought over 8000 patents and 7 trillions dollars in profits over the last 40 years. its not a waste of time or money, is a long term investment.
I certainly wish this spacecraft well on its landing. I'm a great fan of unmanned space exploration.
But Curiosity's landing technique sure seems to be something Rube Goldberg would have loved.
There are so many ways this can go wrong! I will be amazed if it all works.
This is exciting, I've been watching all this since Pathfinder........
Good luck to Nasa and all
Very Excited myself!!!!
I'm really excited about this. It's sad that majority of the general public probably has no idea that the biggest rover yet is less than a month away from Mars, mostly because the American media is too focused on political garbage.
and behavier control..