Saturday, January 27, 2018

Dare Mighty Things: It’s Been 2,000 Days Since Humankind Successfully Landed a 2,000lb Rover on Mars! @NASA @NASAJPL @MarsCuriosity

A rover roving around the surface of the planet Mars seems nothing new to us now. Sojourner deployed in 1997 – but it had a mass of only 25lbs. Twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity both arrived in 2004 via bouncy ball deployment – a novel concept at the time for machines that had a mass just above 400lbs. But how to deposit a 1,982lb rover with lots of sensitive equipment required more outside-the-box thinking than even the bouncy ball technique would resolve. The “skycrane maneuver” used to deploy rover Curiosity on the Martian surface is still a bewildering feat of multiple stages of engineering and communication. If you haven’t seen it before here’s the JPL video that shows how this is done:

Curiosity has returned many images of the surface of the planet and made many interesting discoveries along the way:

Simply amazing. Thank you science.

And yes, ‘bots are capable of selfies too:

🙂

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