Monday, August 6, 2012

Curiosity

You may or may not have known/cared about the Curiosity Rover that landed on Mars a few hours ago. Sadly I had forgotten that it was tonight and missed the live feed. I'm sure that somewhere there is a video of the live stuff. But my brother showed me this thing on Nasa's site where you can watch a simulation of it

Check it our here.

Click the button that says "Click Here". Simple enough. Once it loads a new window will pop up. The first time I did it it took a few minutes for the planets and everything to load up. Then click on "Preview Mode" and it will start the simulation at about 18 minutes to touchdown. Then you can just watch it do its thing.

You can rotate the camera and all the fun stuff. Zoom in and out. Fast forward or rewind. It's really neat. You can also click on other planets and moons and other space items and it will zip over to them and you can check them out too. Which was fun!

The simulator shows the velocity (which got up to over 13,000 mph!), altitude, etc. And it has a secondary countdown for the current phase. That way you know right when something big will happen.

Check it out. I promise it is amazing! I'll probably have some more posts about Curiosity up as it explores Mars.

You can always follow along on the Curiosity twitter page.

And here is a link to the first picture from Curiosity (at least I think it is) from the Nasa twitter page.

Also here is a cool thing I found on the Nasa site that gives details about all the parts of Curiosity. And a link to the Mars Science Laboratory which has all sorts of cool stuff.



2 comments:

  1. I was awake when it landed last night, but sadly there was no live feed. The only way Earth new it had landed was a by a series of beeps. Then, 14 minutes later, the photos started coming in

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  2. You're right. I watched a video after explaining what would happen the whole time. I'm still pretty excited to to see what happens.

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