The International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Sunday, July 28, 2013
OBSERVING THE ROVER FROM SPACE
FROM: NASA
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity appears as a bluish dot near the lower right corner of this enhanced-color view from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The rover's tracks are visible extending from the landing site, "Bradbury Landing," in the left half of the scene. Two bright, relatively blue spots surrounded by darker patches are where the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft's landing jets cleared away reddish surface dust at the landing site. North is toward the top. For scale, the two parallel lines of the wheel tracks are about 10 feet (3 meters) apart. HiRISE shot this image on June 27, 2013, when Curiosity was at an outcrop called "Shaler" in the "Glenelg" area of Gale Crater. Subsequently the rover drove away from Glenelg toward the southwest. When HiRISE captured this view, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was rolled for an eastward-looking angle rather than straight downward. The afternoon sun illuminated the scene from the western sky, so the lighting was nearly behind the camera. Specifically, the angle from sun to orbiter to rover was just 5.47 degrees. This geometry hides shadows and reveals subtle color variations. The image is one product from HiRISE observation ESP_032436_1755. Other image products from this observation are available at http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_032436_1755 . HiRISE is one of six instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Science Laboratory projects for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona › Related release.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
Saturday, July 20, 2013
CELEBRATION AND APOLLO 11
FROM: NASA
Mission Control Celebrates Success of Apollo 11
Flight controllers celebrate the successful conclusion of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission on July 24, 1969, at NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston. On July 20, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong planted the first human foot on another world. With more than half a billion people watching on television, he climbed down the ladder and proclaimed: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Image Credit: NASA.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Monday, July 15, 2013
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Friday, July 12, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Monday, July 8, 2013
Saturday, July 6, 2013
MARS PATHFINDER ANNIVERSARY
FROM: NASA
Anniversary of the Mars Pathfinder Landing
Mars Pathfinder was launched on Dec. 4, 1996 at 1:58:07 am EST on a Delta II rocket. After an uneventful journey, the spacecraft safely landed on the surface of Mars on July 4, 1997. The first set of data was received shortly after 5:00 p.m. followed by the release of images at 9:30 p.m. The Sojourner rover, with three Lewis components, then began its Martian trek and returned images and other data over the course of three months.
After operating on the surface of Mars three times longer than expected and returning a tremendous amount of new information about the red planet, NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission completed the last successful data transmission cycle from Pathfinder at 6:23 a.m. EDT on Sept. 27, 1997. A panoramic view of Pathfinder's Ares Vallis landing site reveals traces of a warmer, wetter past, showing a floodplain covered with a variety of rock types, boulders, rounded and semi-rounded cobbles and pebbles. These rocks and pebbles are thought to have been swept down and deposited by floods which occurred early in Mars' evolution in the Ares and Tiu regions near the Pathfinder landing site. The image, which is a 75-frame, color-enhanced mosaic taken by the Imager for Mars Pathfinder, looks to the southwest toward the Rock Garden, a cluster of large, angular rocks tilted in a downstream direction from the floods.
The Pathfinder rover, Sojourner, is shown snuggled against a rock nicknamed Moe. The south peak of two hills, known as Twin Peaks, can be seen on the horizon, about 1 kilometer (6/10ths of a mile) from the lander. The rocky surface is comprised of materials washed down from the highlands and deposited in this ancient outflow channel by a catastrophic flood. The remarkably successful Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, part of NASA's Discovery program of fast track, low-cost missions with highly focused science objectives, was the first spacecraft to explore Mars in more than 20 years. In all, during its three months of operations, the mission returned about 2.6 gigabits of data, which included more than 16,000 images of the Martian landscape from the lander camera, 550 images from the rover and about 8.5 million temperature, pressure and wind measurements. Image Credit: NASA/JPL
Friday, July 5, 2013
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Monday, July 1, 2013
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