

Curiosity landing is in a week - huhtenberg
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/

======
stevewilhelm
The simulated video of the Curiosity landing makes it seem very complicated
and prone to failure.

Wondering what full scale prototypes where built and what testing was done.

~~~
chadr
from Wikipedia... "The landing sequence alone requires six vehicle
configurations, 76 pyrotechnic devices, the largest supersonic parachute ever
built, and more than 500,000 lines of code."

~~~
flexd
They check for a few more error cases than the average project I guess, hehe.

    
    
      am looking forward to seeing it land successfully!
    

Regardless of how it lands though, it should be exciting to watch.

------
bhickey
If you're in the area, there's an event at Ames:
[http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/events/2012/ames-
curiosity....](http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/events/2012/ames-
curiosity.html)

~~~
larsberg
In Chicago, the Adler Planetarium is having a 9pm-2am viewing party as well
(<http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/curiosityparty> ).

------
Achshar
What will they show in the live feed? It makes me sad we can't have a (near)
live feed from the delivery case or even the sky crane. Except for the
understandable 19 (or so?) minutes or lag due to speed of light, the bandwidth
is not nearly enough. It would have been cool of another level to be able to
see the rover landing live, 19 light minutes away.

~~~
ricardobeat
I'm more curious about why can't we have a live feed. We had one from the moon
40 years ago, is bandwidth also degraded by the distance to Mars?

~~~
Achshar
The moon is relatively (very) close (238,900 miles vs depending on where they
are in their respective orbits, mars can be anywhere from 36 million miles to
over 250 million miles away from earth), there are good relay satellites for
moon and sun never comes in between to disturb incoming signal.

------
tocomment
I don't understand why they need the skycrane. Why did Viking land ok without
this complexity? Why can't they reuse whatever they did for Viking?

~~~
ddbeck
One of the reasons for the skycrane is that it minimizes the area of the
Martian surface that will be disturbed by the landing rockets. The skycrane
approach moves less surface soil around the landing site (decreasing travel
distance to pristine subjects for geological study) and deposits less rocket
exhaust (which complicates chemical and biological studies).

NASA has an excellent and free ebook, _When Biospheres Collide_ [1], which
goes into great detail about the problems posed by biological contamination
(both forward and back). The book dedicates a long chapter to the great
lengths taken with the Viking landers to avoid contamination problems. Having
read it, I'm not at all surprised NASA is giving alternatives a try.

[1]:
[http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/when_biospheres_collide_d...](http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/when_biospheres_collide_detail.html)

~~~
tocomment
Why didn't Viking worry about disturbing the landing site?

Also If it can drive why does it matter what happens to the landing site?

~~~
ricardobeat
They drive at mm/s speeds. Moving over a few meters because the soil is
stirred up is a huge waste of energy and time, not to mention the risk of
failure.

~~~
mturmon
No, not for curiosity. That robot is expected to drive many kms as part of its
planned activities. Its nominal speed is 30 m per hour.

~~~
dredmorbius
Which is 120 mm/sec -- about 4.75 inches, as parent noted.

~~~
mturmon
Actually, 30 m/hour is 8 mm/sec. But that's a bad choice of units, because
seconds is not a good mission time scale.

The point is that, within a couple of hours, you can drive beyond the
contamination radius. And, over the span of the mission, you most certainly
will.

~~~
dredmorbius
Correct. Not sure where my math went bad.

------
alex_c
Why / where exactly does the sky crane fly away after releasing the lander? Is
it just to get it safely out of the way?

~~~
ceejayoz
Yes. You don't want it landing on top of the rover, so it flies a predictable
path away and crashes.

