

This is what Curiosity saw as it landed on Mars - bmahmood
http://youtu.be/UcGMDXy-Y1I

======
alister
A nice play by play of the landing culled from the YouTube comments
(attributed to "flyhighj65"):

    
    
      0:15 - Obviously heat shield separation
    
      ~0:25 to 0:30 - Back shell separation and powered flight
    
      0:31 to 0:38 - The rover banks to move towards the
      upper left corner of the screen (camera looks opposite
      direction of motion)
    
      0:38 to 0:41 - The rover﻿ banks the opposite direction
      and stops its horizontal motion to drop straight down
    
      ~0:47 - Skycrane maneuver begins
    
      0:48 - Wheels deploy (top left corner of screen)
    
      Touchdown is shortly after the video ends
    

Just as aside, it's amazing that people spend significant effort making
intelligent remarks on YouTube (such as the above) only to see it get buried
in a sea of inane comments. (It's already at 1,380 comments for this Mars
video.)

~~~
jessriedel
FYI, it's sped up because they only take 4-5 frame per seconds. The heat
shield separation is at +278s (278 seconds after atmospheric entry) and the
touchdown is at +416s. That's a difference of 138 seconds, which in the video
takes about 38 sec (0:15 - 0:53), so the play-back speed up is about a factor
of 3.6.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
I read somewhere that they have 720p full color video of the descent at 10fps,
which will be transmitted eventually. I can't wait.

~~~
jessriedel
I know that a HD version will eventually make its way from Mars to Earth, but
I have read in a couple of places that the Descent Imager only operates at 5
fps. That could have been a mis-statement though.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
I (or perhaps what I was reading) may have had the descent cam's stats
confused with the high-quality mast cam, which won't be deployed until next
week. Still exciting, though.

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marvin
There was a discussion on Reddit about the instrumentation on MER -
specifically that every concievable scientific instrument is on the rover, but
no HD video camera or microphone. Apparently, the reasoning behind this is
that these things are scientifically uninteresting.

But imagine the PR benefit of getting full-motion video and audio from Mars.
Even if we don't learn anything interesting from this, the media effect would
have been tremendous. People could finally see video and sound on the evening
news, in HD...almost like being on Mars. It's too bad the MER team wasn't
willing to do this, seems like it would have been a relatively cheap addition
to the project.

But don't get me wrong, this is still very, very cool.

~~~
Achshar
If i remember correctly, rover has a 720p video camera that records 10fps. And
considering the speed of the movement of camera or robotic arm, any higher fps
would have been redundant. I don't know about microphone though. Plus there is
a novelty factor. The first full HD 3d 60fps video with 6 channel sound will
probably be the most popular YouTube video of the year. But that's it, no one
would watch the second video because all of it would be same. largely because
rovers travels very slowly and also because it's just rocks and dust, just
like any desert here on earth. The cost of the added weight and volume of more
capable camera for just one popular video is not justified IMO.

~~~
ra
Yes it does have a 720p 10fps camera; it actually has 17 camera's in all:
[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/curiosity-mars-
rov...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/curiosity-mars-rover-
cameras/)

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eupharis
The success of NASA in putting landers/rovers on Mars is spectacular. Maybe
not in absolute terms but...

    
    
      NASA = 7 successes
      everyone else = failure
    

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Timeline>

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ghshephard
I can't wait to see the higher definition videos. Also - there was quite a bit
of dust being blown around there.

It will be interesting to see if there is any followup as to whether the
SkyCrane maneuver is really required, or, whether in the future, we can land
directly on rocket engines. Particularly with the Plutonium power supply - no
need to be concerned about solar cells getting covered in dust.

Also - I seem to recall that there can be fairly significant dust storms on
mars anyways - so it's not as though landing without rocket engines means that
the Rover will be immune from getting struck by pebbles/rockets/dust.

~~~
amock
A couple of people from the JPL team talked about why they used the sky crane
rather than other methods and they mentioned that the amount of dust caused by
using rockets all the way down would cause issues for the rover. So it seems
like some dust is ok but too much would cause enough problems that the sky
crane is worth it.

~~~
prawn
Might they want to minimise interference with the layers of dust/dirt on the
ground, where possible? Probably not - maybe that's akin to explorers worrying
about longboats pushing into the sand when they reached a beach...

~~~
amock
They plan on driving a significant distance, so I don't think they're too
worried about contamination of the landing site. I think the real issue is
that they have many sensitive instruments and protecting against very small
high velocity particles is difficult.

~~~
fjarlq
Andrew Bingham, the engineer of the hazcam dust covers, explains in detail:

[http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=29612.msg93...](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=29612.msg938852#msg938852)

 _"These dust covers were one of the last things added to the rover. The MSL
HazCams are build-to-print copies of the MER HazCams. On MER, the cameras were
protected inside the lander, and in over 10 rover-years on the ground they
haven't seen dust building up enough to be worrysome. The Skycrane system was
supposed to reduce the plume ground pressure during landing to the point where
dust wouldn't be an issue for MSL."_

 _"But after Phoenix landed and everyone saw the pictures of pebbles ON TOP OF
the pads on the bottom of the lander legs, and the legs themselves coated with
a sticky looking layer of dust, some concerned folks looked at the issue more
closely. It turned out there is a core flow in the Mars Lander Engines on the
descent stage that stays strong all the way to the surface, even hanging at
the end of the skycrane. And that can kick up a lot of dust+reaction products
during the skycrane maneuver, some of which would go back towards the rover.
There was a review of hardware in danger of being coated with "sticky" dust;
everything was determined to be dust tolerant EXCEPT the HazCams."_

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tterrace
What's happening at the beginning there with that disc-like object that looks
like it's free falling towards the surface?

Edit: ah, the Youtube description says the beginning part is the heatshield
separating.

~~~
kmm
From the Wikipedia page[1], I would say it was the heat shield.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory>

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jessriedel
When does the parachute detach? When is the sky crane activated?

Is the cloudy stuff at the end of the video just dust kicked up by the rover,
or an existing cloud (of dust)?

Also, I would love to see some image stabilization applied.

EDIT: Answered! <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4349125>

~~~
skeletonjelly
<http://i.imgur.com/hFoHy.jpg>

The cloudy stuff is dust from the powered descent. The top bit lowered the MSL
down via cables which were 20m long, so the distance was short enough to blow
up the dust but far away enough to not cause too much disturbance (they were
worried about damaging the MSL)

~~~
jessriedel
Yea, I know the general idea. You're probably right, but how can you tell part
of the dust wasn't already there?

~~~
skeletonjelly
Dust from where? Earth? The MSL is assembled in a clean room. You can see how
much dust was stirred up in the video here:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I&feature=g-wl](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I&feature=g-wl)

~~~
jessriedel
There are dust storms on Mars, even with its thin atmosphere.

I'm not sure why you linked me to the original post.

~~~
skeletonjelly
The image? Referring to this:

> When does the parachute detach? When is the sky crane activated?

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tsahyt
Again, congratulations to the team responsible for that at NASA! Space
exploration has advanced science like no other area.

What really rubs me the wrong way are some of those Youtube comments that go
like "Why spend so much money on NASA?". Clearly, the spendings on NASA are
minuscule compared to what the US spends on it's military or on the banks.
That's a rather sad fact.

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biot
I'd love to see the video from the viewpoint of the sky crane.

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malkia
I think it saw this - [http://www.alicesastroinfo.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/08/Cu...](http://www.alicesastroinfo.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/08/Curiosity+killed+the+cat.+source+smosh+facebook+page_06d5f5_3980829.jpg)

