In a remarkable display of coordinated orbital photography, the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a dramatic picture of Curiosity during its descent into Gale Crater on Sunday night. NASA’s latest rover mission, the largest and most complicated launched to date, landed late Sunday night Pacific Time. The science team worked through the night to make sense of the first few grainy images taken from the rover’s undercarriage.
The new image shows Curiosity – still wedded to the SkyCrane – being slowed by a fully unfurled parachute. The rover’s parachute was the longest and strongest ever built for a planetary mission, capable of withstanding a 9-G shock and a load of 65,000 pounds. (Engineers expected a load of 50,000 – 55,000 pounds.) It was designed to slow the spacecraft from 1,000 miles per hour to 200 miles per hour.
Dr. Douglas Adams, MSL’s Parachute Cognizant Engineer, told Gizmodo that the parachute was 16 stories tall, 50 feet in diameter, and made of the same type of nylon found in outerwear like raincoats.
Sarah Milkovich, a HiRISE mission scientist at JPL, said that “MRO was about 340 kilometers away from MSL when this image was taken.” The elevation of Curiosity when the photograph was taken is unclear at the moment; this value is important because it could allow engineers to track down the precise landing location of the rover.
HiRISE is the most advanced camera currently in orbit around Mars, capable of resolving objects the size of a dinner plate (30 cm) on the martian surface. The instrument’s handlers captured a similar image of the Phoenix Mars Lander after its parachute had deployed.
Another photograph released Monday morning shows the rover’s wheel in the foreground and an apparent ridge in the distance.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
