The rover curiosity landed safely on mars! NASA used the odyssey satellite to transmit these images from the rover. Hopefully this rover can make some great discoveries.
truly remarkable! I still can't get over the fact my parents witnessed the apollo landing sitting on a sailboat in costa rica over 40 years ago live.
I have to ask, why spend all that money on such an amazing bit of tech and give it a camera that points to the ground??? There must be another camera on that, right?
Surely there is. They're rocket scientists. I can see why everyone's excited, but I'm not really. It's a rover that has landed on mars. When we get humans over there, then that'll be cool.
There are 17 cameras. Most are HD and color. This image was taken through a dust cover, and trasmitted as a 64x64 thumbnail in black and white. Soon there will be hundreds of breathtaking HD images. I'm not sure what camera this image was taken with, but there are cameras aimed at the ground. Their purpose is to watch for sudden drop-offs.
There are 17 cameras on the rover, so yeah, I think one of them could point somewhere other than the ground :tongue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#Rover They just have to remember that you can't drink the water, not one drop...
^^ Ha. Sounds like my parents when we went to Mexico. But the soil can be heated to produce oxygen (among others) Water can be figured out later. Space age filtration systems?
The water thing was just a Doctor Who reference, but I don't think melting Martian glaciers for drinking water without some really advanced filtration system is a good idea in real life, either :sneakiness: It's funny how that was a pretty normal Internet download speed in the mid-90s, now we can download at the same speed from Mars.
It's not now, it was 0.1-7kb/s since 70s. Depends on weather conditions etc. And it's freaking high speed, because you can't install megawatt transceiver on rover/probe so you have to deal with a lot of noise and low signal strength.
