NASA's Curiosity Rover Caught in the Act of Landing

Aug. 06, 2012

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Guy Webster / D.C. Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6278 / 818-393-9011
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov

RELEASE: 12-269

NASA'S CURIOSITY ROVER CAUGHT IN THE ACT OF LANDING

PASADENA, Calif. -- An image from the High Resolution Imaging Science
Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
(MRO) captured the Curiosity rover still connected to its 51-foot
(almost 16 meter)-wide parachute as it descended toward its landing
site at Gale Crater Sunday.

"If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we
probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape," said Sarah
Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "When you consider that we have
been working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands
to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken, you
begin to realize how challenging this picture was to obtain."

The image of Curiosity on its parachute can be found at:

http://go.nasa.gov/NeQyBW

The image was taken while MRO was 211 miles (340 kilometers) away from
the parachuting rover. Curiosity and its rocket-propelled backpack,
contained within the conical-shaped back shell, had not deployed yet.
At the time, Curiosity was about two miles (three kilometers) above
the Martian surface.

"Guess you could consider us the closest thing to paparazzi on Mars,"
said Milkovich. "We definitely caught NASA's newest celebrity in the
act."

Curiosity, NASA's latest contribution to the Martian landscape, landed
at 10:32 p.m. PDT Aug. 5 (1:32 a.m. EDT Aug. 6) near the foot of a
three-mile tall mountain inside Gale Crater, which is 96 miles in
diameter.

In other Curiosity news, one part of the rover team at JPL continues
to review the data from Sunday night's landing while another
continues to prepare the 1-ton mobile laboratory for its future
explorations of Gale Crater. One key assignment given to Curiosity
for its first full day on Mars is to raise its high-gain antenna.
Using this antenna will increase the data rate the rover can
communicate directly with Earth. The mission will use relays to
orbiters as the primary method for sending data home because that
method is much more energy efficient for the rover.

Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as
large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and
Opportunity. Some of the tools, such as a laser-firing instrument for
checking rocks' elemental composition from a distance, are the first
of their kind on Mars. Curiosity will use a drill and scoop which is
located at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered
samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples
into the rover's analytical laboratory instruments.

To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five
times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site
places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's
interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and
sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity mission is managed by JPL for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was
designed, developed and assembled at JPL. For more information on the
mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/mars

and

http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl

Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:

http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity

and

http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity

HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The
instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in
Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Exploration
Rover projects are managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate. JPL is a division of the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver,
built the orbiter.

For more about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/mro


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