Curiosity Starts Driving 35
littlesparkvt tips news that the Curiosity Mars rover began driving today at Bradbury Landing in Gale Crater. The rover rolled forward about 4.5 meters, then stopped, rotated 120 degrees, and rolled another 2.5 meters. The article has a picture of the rover's tracks in the Martian dust, and you can browse the image gallery or raw image feed for more. Matt Heverly, the rover's lead driver, confirmed that the mobility system is functioning perfectly in the lead-up to its first major land trek. "Curiosity will spend several more days of working beside Bradbury Landing, performing instrument checks and studying the surroundings, before embarking toward its first driving destination approximately 1,300 feet (400 meters) to the east-southeast." Reader redletterdave adds news that NASA has released an enhanced video of Curiosity's descent from space, which is pretty cool to watch. There was also some minor bad news yesterday; one of the wind speed sensors on the REMS weather instruments was permanently damaged during landing. Emily Lakdawalla explains,"The reason there were two is that it helped triangulate wind speed and also improve accuracy of wind speed measurements when one of the booms is aimed windward or leeward. So the quality of the wind speed data will be harmed, but there will still be wind speed data."
Re:Uh... what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Pu power source makes about 100W of electricity and keep the rover warm. The purpose of slow speed is not to hit things, not to use lot of power, AND because that is completely unnecessary.
And your reference to "Back to the Future" is getting old.
Re:Minor indeed! (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the rover was built during the minor boom years* of the mid 2000's. Thus, budget was not really the same issue as it is today. But I agree it's amazing that more hasn't gone wrong with the complexity of both the rover and the landing involved.
A sky-crane was used instead of a Viking-style landing to avoid kicking up too much debris near the vehicle.
However, most of the thrust would then be underneath, not to the side like the sky-crane gave. Thus, less vehicle-deck-directed pebbles would be kicked up it seems if they did a Viking-style landing, but more (local) dust.
Being they speculate flying pebbles caused the wind-sensor damage based on pebbles found on deck, perhaps the Viking approach is not so bad after all, relatively speaking. A dust bath may be better than a pebble bath.
* "Bubble years" may be a better description.