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Watched 30 Minutes of the Curiosity Rover Landing on Mars

Mars Image from Curiosity

This is not the first rover to land on Mars, but the first one that I was able to watch via the internet. At least, that’s what I was hoping for. What I got was a streaming video of astronomers from NASA reacting to various milestones that Curiosity met as it lands on Mars. In the end, my reward was two low resolution black-and-white images of Mars.

 

Obama: U.S. makes history on Mars

Obama said the successful landing of Curiosity -- "the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet" -- is "an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future." "It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination," Obama said.

 

NASA rover Curiosity lands on Mars after plummet

Mars Image from Curiosity Rover

The most high-tech rover NASA has ever designed landed safely on Mars early Monday, after a 352-million-mile journey and a harrowing plunge through the planet's atmosphere dubbed “7 Minutes of Terror.” Beforehand, with Curiosity on autopilot, engineers became spectators, anxiously waiting to see if Curiosity executed the routine as planned. "I'm not the nervous type, but I haven't been sleeping all that well the last week or so even though I'm still very confident," said engineer Steven Lee.

 

NASA spacecraft speeding toward a landing on Mars

Mars Mission

After an 8 1/2-month voyage through space, NASA's souped-up Mars spacecraft zoomed toward the red planet for what the agency hopes will be an epic touchdown. The fiery punch through the tenuous Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph Sunday night marks the beginning of "seven minutes of terror" as the Curiosity rover aims for a bull's-eye landing inside a massive crater near the equator.

 

Saturn Moon Has Ice Avalanches

Long landslides spotted on Saturn's moon, Iapetus, could help provide clues to similar movements of material on Earth. Scientists studying the icy satellite have determined that flash heating could cause falling ice to travel 10 to 15 times farther than previously expected on Iapetus.

 

Sally Ride, first US woman in space, dies at 61

Sally Ride

Space used to be a man's world. Then came Sally Ride, who blazed a cosmic trail into orbit for U.S. women. With a pitch perfect name out of a pop song refrain, she joined the select club of American space heroes the public knew by heart: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong and Aldrin....

 

Mars rover is a robot geologist with a lab in its belly

The rover Curiosity, nearing Mars, has sophisticated tools to help answer the question: Did the Red Planet ever sustain life — and could it today? In a matter of days, a geologist unlike any on Earth will venture into alien territory.

 

Go online to watch big asteroid zoom past us

A city-block size asteroid will fly by Earth this weekend, well beyond the orbit of the moon, and you can watch it zip safely by live in an online webcast.

 

NASA builds menu for planned Mars mission in 2030s

Through a labyrinth of hallways deep inside a 1960s-era building that has housed research that dates back to the early years of U.S. space travel, a group of scientists in white coats is stirring, mixing, measuring, brushing and, most important, tasting the end result of their cooking.

 

JPL's Curiosity mission comes down to this: the Martian surface

On Aug. 5, as nervous JPL engineers watch, the fate of the rover — capable of pulverizing rocks and ingesting soil — will rest on a landing sequence so far-fetched that some scientists were skeptical it could work.

 

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