The Curiosity On Mars Thread.

shedweller · 08-10-2013 8:11pm

This ties in well with the govt shutdown...
Maybe they dont want us to see something...

Im joking. That would be crazy talk there!

murrax · 08-10-2013 9:07pm

Agree Shed, I think we should leave that to a different forum entirely... we do not want to get a good forum like this side tracked and bogged down by conspiracies and sci-fi...

Zubeneschamali · 08-10-2013 9:19pm

murrax wrote: »

All rover and orbiter missions from pathfinder to the present are the result of seeing something on Mars meteorite 84001 found in Antarctica back in the 80s and examined in 1996.

Eh, no, there were missions in the 60s and 70s too. It's well I remember Vikings 1 and 2. That Antarctic rock had no effect on Mars exploration at all except to generate some press and allow NASA to shake their collection tin in Washington.

JupiterKid · 08-10-2013 9:52pm

murrax wrote: »

Attachment not found.

All rover and orbiter missions from pathfinder to the present are the result of seeing something on Mars meteorite 84001 found in Antarctica back in the 80s and examined in 1996.

Nope - the Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor missions were in the planning stages years before the ALH84001 rock announcement was made.

shedweller · 09-10-2013 2:16am

JupiterKid wrote: »

Nope - the Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor missions were in the planning stages years before the ALH84001 rock announcement was made.

Correct. Although as Zuben said, it certainly hepled drum up financial support!

This lack of updates from Curiosity is killing me. Have the rover drivers gone home to binge watch breaking bad or what? Has Curiosity been given anything to do?

Edit: i went directly to the raw images section and lo and behold, there are loads of pics as recent as yesterday! So there is progress! Yay!!

murrax · 09-10-2013 4:57am

I agree, if alh8400 was a life form as suspected by the NASA team it would indeed require a lot of funding for far more complex missions possibly a manned mission to get the proof and having a President make the announcement was the way to get it rolling. NASA Admin. Dan Goldin himself remarked after the announcement that if it meant having to send astronauts to Mars we will do it.
There are some in NASA who believe they are way too focused on Mars now in the search for life rather than focusing more on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. Still there are lots of interesting months and years ahead and indeed more surprises to come...

shedweller · 31-10-2013 5:10pm

Curiosity just keeps on truckin!

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity completed its first two-day autonomous drive Monday, bringing the mobile laboratory to a good vantage point for pictures useful in selecting the next target the rover will reach out and touch. When it drives autonomously, the rover chooses a safe route to designated waypoints by using its onboard computer to analyze stereo images that it takes during pauses in the drive. Prior to Monday, each day’s autonomous drive came after a segment earlier that day that was exactly charted by rover team members using images sent to Earth. The Sunday-Monday drive was the first time Curiosity ended an autonomous driving segment, then continued autonomously from that same point the next day.
The drives brought Curiosity to about 262 feet (about 80 meters) from "Cooperstown," an outcrop bearing candidate targets for examination with instruments on the rover's arm. The moniker, appropriate for baseball season, comes from a named rock deposit in New York. Curiosity has not used its arm-mounted instruments to examine a target since departing an outcrop called "Darwin" on Sept. 22. Researchers used the arm's camera and spectrometer for four days at Darwin; they plan to use them on just one day at Cooperstown.

I hope there'll be a bit of a left hand turn after this because that mountain is looking closer by the day!
Here's a traverse map that's fairly current. It shows the cooperstown outcrop in the inset.

shedweller · 02-11-2013 9:10pm

Well well, Curiosity covered the few metres to Cooperstown by the looks of things and has sent us an interesting picture, probably the most interesting in the past few weeks! This is from the left navcam.

And this is from the left mastcam:

shedweller · 03-11-2013 2:27am

That weathering looks at odds with the wind direction as indicated by the sand. In the pi ture the wind has blown the sand towards the left. Yet the rocks cracked on top show a very even wear pattern and dont have any directionality to the wear.

Has the weather changed much on mars i wonder?

murrax · 03-11-2013 12:45pm

Seeing these amazing pics of rocks on Mars sure makes me pay a lot more attention to rocks and rock formations here on earth.
I guess the Maven orbiter mission due to launch in a couple of weeks will tell us a lot more about what happened to Mars' atmosphere and combine that with findings from the Insight lander in a couple of years or so may confirm or refute what they seem to suspect what happened to it and when...

shedweller · 03-11-2013 2:20pm

murrax wrote: »

Seeing these amazing pics of rocks on Mars sure makes me pay a lot more attention to rocks and rock formations here on earth.
I guess the Maven orbiter mission due to launch in a couple of weeks will tell us a lot more about what happened to Mars' atmosphere and combine that with findings from the Insight lander in a couple of years or so may confirm or refute what they seem to suspect what happened to it and when...

It just cant happen quickly enough! Us humans lifetimes are way too short.

shedweller · 04-11-2013 1:10pm

Woo Hoo! Science!:)

That would be CHIMRA doing its thing. Scooping samples etc.
CHEMCAM has spotted this, what looks like a stalactite! Although i could be way way off. But it still looks like one....

Capt'n Midnight · 04-11-2013 6:15pm

shedweller wrote: »

Well well, Curiosity covered the few metres to Cooperstown by the looks of things and has sent us an interesting picture, probably the most interesting in the past few weeks! This is from the left navcam.

A new face on Mars ?
Looks a bit like a stickman with the head top right

shedweller · 04-11-2013 6:44pm

Laughing heartily here!

shedweller · 20-11-2013 7:44pm

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/jpl/msl20131120.html

Science observations by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity have been suspended for a few days while engineers run tests to check possible causes of a voltage change detected on Nov. 17.
"The vehicle is safe and stable, fully capable of operating in its present condition, but we are taking the precaution of investigating what may be a soft short," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Jim Erickson at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
A "soft" short is a leak through something that's partially conductive of electricity, rather than a hard short such as one electrical wire contacting another.

This is a wee bit ominous.:(
I reckon they should stick a band aid on this, get Curiosity into top gear and head for the hills! This kind of thing will only get worse from my experience with machines and their ominous signals like this.

shedweller · 03-12-2013 5:04pm

Not much in the way of information or photos but ChemCam has been getting busy last night.

Here's a small panorama i stuck together from last nights uploads. I'm no ansel adams but it'll do! The sand bank at the foot of Mt. sharp is on the left and the crater rim is on the right.

Mountainsandh · 03-12-2013 8:33pm

CHEMCAM has spotted this, what looks like a stalactite! Although i could be
way way off. But it still looks like one....

I noticed that too Shedweller, but I thought it looked more like one sharp rock which would have inserted itself upright in the mud, then solidified.
There's a little thing peeking at the top ?
Have it highlighted on this

shedweller · 04-12-2013 1:43am

Well that explains everything! It looks like an aggregate of some sort. If i had a hammer with me i could break the rock to remove the inclusion. Check out what its like where it hasnt been weathered for aeons.
I'd need to be on mars too but thats beside the point!

TOMP · 22-12-2013 3:33pm

Curiosity might need a pit stop soon ! A lot of wear and holes on the wheels. Especially around 7oclock in the picture below
pia17751cr_0.jpg?itok=aElAhKXn

shedweller · 22-12-2013 4:08pm

Hopefully they wont come apart when the real climb starts. In fairness, the spokes are titanium and have a kind of webbed pattern under the tires so they should keep turning despite the tires coming apart.

Capt'n Midnight · 22-12-2013 8:20pm

I'm just amazed at all the nut and bolts

wouldn't rivets be lighter ?

Maximus Alexander · 23-12-2013 1:02am

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

I'm just amazed at all the nut and bolts

wouldn't rivets be lighter ?

There's got to be a reason for it. I don't think they do anything without a reason.

shedweller · 23-12-2013 1:57am

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

I'm just amazed at all the nut and bolts

wouldn't rivets be lighter ?

I too would love to know. I imagine weight vs strength plays a major part.
Still though, look at an airliner. Not covered in little bolts eh? No. Thousands of rivets.
Its a puzzler alright.

thecommander · 23-12-2013 3:03am

shedweller wrote: »

I too would love to know. I imagine weight vs strength plays a major part.
Still though, look at an airliner. Not covered in little bolts eh? No. Thousands of rivets.
Its a puzzler alright.

Friend of mine that works on the project said this about using hex bolts rather than welds on another piece. Probably the same answer;

The main reason is that we need to be able to disassemble and reassemble devices if the need arises during testing (like if we do a vibration test and a part breaks). You can imagine if you started assembling things and in some testing something broke but it was all welded, you’d have to go back and redeliver a larger part. It would likely save a little weight to weld (and we’re very conscience of weight), but I believe that the ability to address any issues that come up outweigh the added mass of bolting.

shedweller · 23-12-2013 8:28am

Ah yes. You mentioned that before. Thanks!

thecommander · 23-12-2013 9:52am

shedweller wrote: »

Ah yes. You mentioned that before. Thanks!

Probably the same answer (total guess!)

shedweller · 23-12-2013 10:54pm

thecommander wrote: »

Probably the same answer (total guess!)

Are you still in contact with the msl team?

thecommander · 24-12-2013 4:55pm

shedweller wrote: »

Are you still in contact with the msl team?

Yup, one of them.

shedweller · 01-01-2014 2:14am

Happy new year to all!

Evil_g · 01-01-2014 4:29am

shedweller wrote: »

Happy new year to all!

Off topic. Banned.

The Curiosity On Mars Thread.

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