Aug 06 2012
Curiosity Has Landed On Mars!
It truly is amazing how much NASA accomplishes with one of the smallest budgets in the federal government. The joke has always been that the DoD blows through the entire NASA budget before the end January. Or how the nation spends more on Pizza than on the exploration of Space each year. Today, we learn once more how some in the government spend the taxpayer’s money well and with unvarnished success (verses policies like the war on poverty, the stimulus bill, etc that are clearly NOT successes).
Today, Curiosity landed on Mars, with one of the coolest pictures ever captured in the history of mankind:
Click to enlarge. That white box outlines Curiosity as it descended to the Martian surface. This is REALLY COOL! (Especially if you are a NASA propeller head geek – and I are one). I think this is the first time we “saw” a landing on another planet from space. We ‘hear’ them all the time in telemetry data repeated back. But a visual picture I think this might be a first.
I don’t think even the Huygens probe to Titan or the Galileo probe to Jupiter were ‘pictured’ like this.
Way cool!
This is what the government should be spending money on. Beautiful picture of rover landing. Can’t wait for all the ‘exploring’ to start.
Beginning of an exciting new adventure on The Red Planet. As the instruments get checked out and Curiosity begins to move we’ll be hearing daily of some impressive new finding.
AJ: Sorry for hijacking the previous thread. I had to stay up to see if this beauty landed OK and I couldn’t contain myself! 🙂
Exquisite targeting…and a bit of luck. I’ve been involved in similar imaging shots myself, and luck does play a role. That, and multiple shots. 🙂
Layman – space stuff welcomed on ANY thread. My bad for not having one up earlier