How about we spend money on science instead of on government cheese, which is damn near half our federal budget? If we weren't paying people to be layabouts for decades, what might we have achieved?

Well that explains why we had the Lounge before we had DC.

Well, I meant landing on the surface and returning to the orbiting craft, but I did consider the one-way option. Problem is, to sustain life in space for months to get there, you already have to build a self sustaining ecosystem so you might as well come back... Unless they can manage to land it on the surface and turn it into stage one of a base.

NASA releases low-res video of Mars rover descent

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PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — NASA's Curiosity rover has transmitted a low-resolution video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the Martian atmosphere, giving earthlings a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world.

As thumbnails of the video flashed on a big screen on Monday, scientists and engineers at the NASA Jet Propulsion let out "oohs" and "aahs." The recording began with the protective heat shield falling away and ended with dust being kicked up as the rover was lowered by cables inside an ancient crater.
It was a sneak preview, since it'll take some time before full-resolution frames are beamed back depending on other priorities.

The full video "will just be exquisite," said Michael Malin, the chief scientist of the instrument.

NASA celebrated the precision landing of a rover on Mars and marveled over the mission's flurry of photographs — grainy, black-and-white images of Martian gravel, a mountain at sunset and, most exciting of all, the spacecraft's white-knuckle plunge through the red planet's atmosphere.

Curiosity, a roving laboratory the size of a compact car, landed right on target late Sunday after an eight-month, 352-million-mile journey. It parked its six wheels about four miles from its ultimate science destination — Mount Sharp, rising from the floor of Gale Crater near the equator.

Extraordinary efforts were needed for the landing because the rover weighs one ton, and the thin Martian atmosphere offers little friction to slow down a spacecraft. Curiosity had to go from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, unfurling a parachute, then firing rockets to brake. In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered it to the ground at 2 mph.

At the end of what NASA called "seven minutes of terror," the vehicle settled into place almost perfectly flat in the crater it was aiming for.

"We have ended one phase of the mission much to our enjoyment," mission manager Mike Watkins said. "But another part has just begun."

The nuclear-powered Curiosity will dig into the Martian surface to analyze what's there and hunt for some of the molecular building blocks of life, including carbon.
It won't start moving for a couple of weeks, because all the systems on the $2.5 billion rover have to be checked out. Color photos and panoramas will start coming in the next few days.

But first NASA had to use tiny cameras designed to spot hazards in front of Curiosity's wheels. So early images of gravel and shadows abounded. The pictures were fuzzy, but scientists were delighted.

The photos show "a new Mars we have never seen before," Watkins said. "So every one of those pictures is the most beautiful picture I have ever seen."
In one of the photos from the close-to-the-ground hazard cameras, if you squinted and looked the right way, you could see "a silhouette of Mount Sharp in the setting sun," said an excited John Grotzinger, chief mission scientist from the California Institute of Technology.

A high-resolution camera on the orbiting 7-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying 211 miles directly above the plummeting Curiosity, snapped a photo of the rover dangling from its parachute about a minute from touchdown. The parachute's design can be made out in the photo.

"It's just mind-boggling to me," said Miguel San Martin, chief engineer for the landing team.

Curiosity is the heaviest piece of machinery NASA has landed on Mars, and the success gave the space agency confidence that it can unload equipment that astronauts may need in a future manned trip to the red planet.
The landing technique was hatched in 1999 in the wake of devastating back-to-back Mars spacecraft losses. Back then, engineers had no clue how to land super-heavy spacecraft. They brainstormed different possibilities, consulting Apollo-era engineers and pilots of heavy-lift helicopters.

"I think its engineering at its finest. What engineers do is they make the impossible possible," said former NASA chief technologist Bobby Braun. "This thing is elegant. People say it looks crazy. Each system was designed for a very specific function."
Because of budget constraints, NASA canceled its joint U.S.-European missions to Mars, scheduled for 2016 and 2018.

"When's the next lander on Mars? The answer to that is nobody knows," Bolden said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

But if Curiosity finds something interesting, he said, it could spur the public and Congress to provide more money for more Martian exploration. No matter what, he said, Curiosity's mission will help NASA as it tries to send astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.
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Well, honestly, since there's really no frame of reference in the shot it's kinda boring.

I think it would be great if someday, they could land a craft somewhere near an existing camera (set up in a previous mission obviously) so we could see that sucker coming in. It'd be awesome footage.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/6...-full_full.jpg

Scene of a Martian Landing

The four main pieces of hardware that arrived on Mars with NASA's Curiosity rover were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image about 24 hours after landing. The large, reduced-scale image points out the strewn hardware: the heat shield was the first piece to hit the ground, followed by the back shell attached to the parachute, then the rover itself touched down, and finally, after cables were cut, the sky crane flew away to the northwest and crashed. Relatively dark areas in all four spots are from disturbances of the bright dust on Mars, revealing the darker material below the surface dust.

Around the rover, this disturbance was from the sky crane thrusters, and forms a bilaterally symmetrical pattern. The darkened radial jets from the sky crane are downrange from the point of oblique impact, much like the oblique impacts of asteroids. In fact, they make an arrow pointing to Curiosity.

This image was acquired from a special 41-degree roll of MRO, larger than the normal 30-degree limit. It rolled towards the west and towards the sun, which increases visible scattering by atmospheric dust as well as the amount of atmosphere the orbiter has to look through, thereby reducing the contrast of surface features. Future images will show the hardware in greater detail. Our view is tilted about 45 degrees from the surface (more than the 41-degree roll due to planetary curvature), like a view out of an airplane window. Tilt the images 90 degrees clockwise to see the surface better from this perspective. The views are primarily of the shadowed side of the rover and other objects.

The image scale is 39 centimeters (15.3 inches) per pixel.

Complete HiRISE image products are available at: http://uahirise.org/releases/msl-descent.php.

That's really cool. I'd like to know the distances between them all.

These are pretty raw images at present. When the hype settles, they will start putting scales on the images.

I've been so busy since I stayed up for the landing and haven't been able to check NASA's site. Thanks for posting Planet "Mars" Man :D

Meh,... Only because of the Iranian dude in a mohawk.

;)

Hey Donger, according to NASA's website, there is going to be a longer and more detailed video of the landing. Just FYI.

Always happy to help out a fellow space freak. :D

Yep, I know. Bandwidth limitations and priorities.

LOL....

http://twitter.com/SarcasticRover

SarcasticRover ‏@SarcasticRover
Every where I turn, this stupid crater looks like Spectacle Rock in Legend of Zelda. Just want to go home.

SarcasticRover ‏@SarcasticRover
Is the PRIME DIRECTIVE "Don't interfere with alien life" or "Murder alien life with a laser"? Asking for a friend. JK DO A SCIENCE!

SarcasticRover ‏@SarcasticRover
I'm just gonna do a science on this dirt here… Science done! It's made of dirt! WIN FOR SCIENCE! Why did you all abandon me?

SarcasticRover ‏@SarcasticRover
LET'S ALL DO A SCIENCE!! It's like sports for your mind - only no one appreciates you and maybe you get a chemical burn!

SarcasticRover ‏@SarcasticRover
I sent back 5MB of data to Earth today… it was an MP3 of "Bust a Move" by Young MC. LOL THEY HATE THAT SONG!

SarcasticRover ‏@SarcasticRover
If they'd let Michael Bay design me like I wanted, I'd have a robot penis and spinners. And everyone on this planet would recognize!