Curiosity Lands on Mars: Know What You're Watching When You're Watching '7 Minutes of Terror'
Later today, at 10:30 p.m. West Coast time, NASA's Curiosity rover is scheduled to touch down on the surface of Mars. If it's successful, the landing will represent not just a step forward for Martian exploration; it will also represent progress for interplanetary navigation.
But ... if it's successful. People are calling Curiosity's impending landing "seven minutes of terror" for a reason: Though there are many reasons to hope that the landing will go smoothly -- more than 2.5 billion reasons, in fact -- there is also much potential for the touch-down to go spectacularly wrong.
Here's a guide to Curiosity's trip as it's gone so far and as it's expected (and hoped) to conclude.
What is Curiosity, exactly?
The rover is basically a really expensive, and really advanced, robotic photographer. Curiosity -- full name: The Mars Science Laboratory -- is, as our Ross Andersen has put it, "a dune buggy equipped with a set of tools and instruments to shame Inspector Gadget." It carries ten instruments in total, among them two rectangular "eyes" -- the first a primary imaging camera featuring different filters and focal lengths, and the second a large, circular camera that can fire a laser that turns rock into vapor. (Another camera on the rover picks up the images from the laser-firer and interprets their composition.)
So "this rover can go around firing laser beams at rocks and other materials to find out what they're made of; I'd say that's one of its most impressive instruments," planetary scientist Michael Mischna told Andersen. And the rover can also gauge Martian weather. It can film in HD. And in 360-degree panoramas.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/curiosity-lands-on-mars-know-what-youre-watching-when-youre-watching-7-minutes-of-terror/260725/
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