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Curiosity's second day on Mars 'flawless': NASA
by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) Aug 8, 2012


NASA rover Curiosity's second day on Mars went "flawlessly," NASA said Wednesday, confirming the antennas, communication links and generator on the $2.5 billion robot are all working well.

"We feel very confident we have a lot of data capacity now, that we have all these links, and that was one of the major objectives of that first part of the mission," mission manager Jennifer Trosper told reporters at a press conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

She added that a pair of cameras -- set like two large eyes on the newly extended remote sensing mast -- will be used Thursday to give scientists their first full-color panoramic 360-degree view around the rover.

NASA released a low resolution black and white panoramic Wednesday that shows a vast sediment-covered plain, with low mountains in the distance.

"The first impression you get is how earth-like this seems," commented John Grotzinger, a scientist for the mission.

"All those materials are derived from the erosion of those mountains," he added, explaining that the sediments were brought down into the crater by water that once pooled there.

These signs of water on Red Planet hint that some form of life was once likely -- even though Mars is now a dry place with a thin atmosphere, extreme winters and dust storms -- and they're Curiosity's reason for being.

The nuclear-powered rover is designed to hunt for soil-based signatures of life on the Earth's nearest neighbor and send back data to prepare for a future human mission.

It is the biggest robot ever built for planetary exploration -- weighing in at a ton, about the size of a small car -- and carries a complex chemistry kit to zap rocks, drill soil and test for radiation.

Grotzinger noted that the images show the rover's harrowing and complex descent on Monday "did more than give us a great ride, it gave our science team an amazing freebie."

"The thrust from the rockets actually dug 0.5 meter (1.6 feet) trench in the surface," he said. "It appears we can see Martian bedrock on the bottom."

Knowing how far the bedrock lies beneath the surface is "valuable data we can use going forward," he explained.

In other good news, Trosper said the indications are that Curiosity's electricity generator is making "more power that was expected."

That's going to keep the rover operating longer, she explained, and added that the team was also able to resolve an anomaly that had been hindering the rover's weather-sensing equipment.

She noted that the data shows temperatures around Curiosity are a little warmer than predicted, but they "are still looking at why."

She did not give any specific temperature readings, but NASA had initially predicted frigid temperatures at Curiosity's landing site of between -90 and zero degrees Celsius.

NASA also released a rover self-portrait, taken by the navigation cameras on mast, and another image of the rover's shadow.

Tuesday, about 36 hours after the rover landed on Mars, NASA released what it jokingly dubbed a "crime scene" aerial shot of where the parachute, heat shield and vehicle had come down.

Next up, Curiosity will haul the Mars Science Laboratory as far as halfway up Mount Sharp, a towering three-mile (five-kilometer) Martian mountain with sediment layers that may be up to a billion years old.

But it may be a full year before the remote-controlled rover gets to the base of the peak, which is believed to be within a dozen miles (20 kilometers) of the rover's landing site.

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Mars Curiosity photo sparks debate
Pasadena, Calif. (UPI) Aug 8, 2012 -A photo of Mars taken by Curiosity may have caught the rover's carrying craft crash-landing, although it would be an "insane" coincidence, NASA scientists say.

Seconds after landing Sunday night, Curiosity took a handful of fuzzy black-and-white photographs.

One, taken with a device on its rear known as a Hazcam, captured the pebble-strewn ground beneath the rover, one of its wheels -- and a faint but distinctive blotch on the horizon.

Two hours later Curiosity sent home a new batch of higher-resolution photos -- minus the blotch, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

That led to widespread speculation Curiosity may have captured the crash landing of the so-called sky crane that delivered the rover to the surface and then plummeted to the martian surface a safe distance away as planned.

While the blotch did look like a billowing plume of some sort erupting from the martian horizon, capturing the crash "would be an insane coincidence," one engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said.

JPL engineers subsequently received a new image of the landing zone, taken by another satellite, that showed Curiosity, pieces of the spacecraft jettisoned on the way to landing, and 2,000 yards away the wreckage of the "sky crane" -- in the direction Curiosity's Hazcam was facing when it took its first photos.

The new photo also showed the crashing sky crane threw up a violent wave of dirt that marked the surface of Mars.

So the "insane coincidence" may have happened after all, JPL scientists said.

"I don't think you can rule it out," Curiosity mission manager Michael Watkins said Tuesday. "It bears looking into."



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MARSDAILY
Mission Success for MSL Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrument (MEDLI)
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Aug 07, 2012
Mission success for the MSL Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrument (MEDLI) Suite. When the Curiosity rover touched down on the red planet Aug. 6 at 12:32 p.m. CDT, NASA MEDLI researchers were already cheering. The instrumentation payload, carried in the entry vehicle's heatshield, included an intricate array of sophisticated engineering sensors designed to measure heat, pressure and other ... read more


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