Curiosity enters Mars airspace
Published August 06, 2012
FoxNews.com
nd you thought quadratic equations were tough! Thanks to a remarkable combination of engineering and mathematics, a NASA satellite in orbit around Mars was able to capture this picture of the split second when Curiosity fell from the skies to its successful landing on the surface of the red planet.
In the amazing photograph, the rover's parachute is fully deployed and the spacecraft is slowing from the screaming speeds of approach -- as Mars tugged on the spacecraft, it accelerated from 8,000 mph to as much as 13,200 mph -- to a gentle, 2 mph plunkdown on the planet.
“If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape,” said Sarah Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
“When you consider that we have been working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken, you begin to realize how challenging this picture was to obtain.”
Once calculations had been made, checked and double checked, and uploaded to the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the team could only hold its breath and hope.
"We plan to eat pizza and Cheetos, watch NASA TV’s coverage of the landing, and monitor telemetry and data processing," Operations Specialist Richard Leis wrote in a blog post prior
to the event.It appears they did the math correctly.
COURTESY---NASA.
கருத்துகள் இல்லை:
கருத்துரையிடுக