Curiosity Drops in on Mars in High-Res

This movie from NASA's Curiosity rover shows most of the high-resolution frames acquired by the Mars Descent Imager between the jettison of the heat shield and touchdown.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[dutchjohn1952]

To put things into perspective: next star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.2 lightyears away. Voyager 1 is travelling at a speed of 61.000 km/h. since Sept. 1977. With this speed it would take about 120,000 years to visit this nearest star which is one of the hundreds of millions of stars in our milky way. Mars is nice but it is glued to Earth. A journey to the nearest galaxy (Andromeda) would take 710 billion years! Almost 50x longer than the age of universe! Mars is not even the first step.

[Gibbontake]

I feel like this is the moon landing video of my generation.

[Minecraftincolor]

Google "Mars one" ;)

[hardakml]

And sometimes there's nothing better than watching those old Apollo landings here on YouTube. Especially Apollo 16 and Apollo 17. Can you imagine what a moon landing video in 2013 would look like, with the technology we have today?

[dutchjohn1952]

Chuck, I'm sure that entanglement will become a common tool for technicians in a few centuries from now to "deliver" any type of element composed constructions from one part of the universe to a part millions of lightyears away, in a blink of the eye. That is exactly what entaglement is all about. Until now, quantum physics shows that entanglement exists but scientists have no idea how it really works but that at least 10 extremely small dimensions are involved. Your pizza will still be hot!

[dutchjohn1952]

If god would exist, he also created atheists and agnosts like myself. It totally depends on what one defines as god. God may have been or still is a superpower that created the big bang which had all the possibities of physics and quantum physics combined and became active one millionth of a second after the big bang when time and space were starting to exist. It is rather strange to talk about events prior to that because time did not exist then. God must have been the creator of the big bang.

[Chuck Norris]

710 billion years to go to Andromeda? Well that'll take sometime for my pizza to arrive :/

[Tinie Kerman]

The main problem with "warp drives" is not making them work, it is figuring out how to get rid of all the momentum you gain from going FTL. There's so much momentum gained that when you come to stop the craft in the system you want to be in, the energy displaced just rips the system apart.

Hypothetically, anyway

[dutchjohn1952]

Summerbreeze, you are a pathetic wannabe psychologist. You couldn't be more wrong because you're an amateur. I'm a realist and only facts can convince me. I'm not a simpleminded believer as you seem to be. Facts are that you have zero understanding of physics. Entanglement or stable wormholes might do the trick in 200 years but then you are also a long time dead. I am 100% convinced that nobody in this or next generation will be a witness of a man made craft entering our neighboring starsystem.

[SummerBreeze106]

You know our technology 500 yrs from now?You sound bitter,perhaps because the dream of the early space age never came to fruition in your lifetime?Well isn't that rather selfish?You don't want it to be so because it wasn't in your lifetime?If you can't see it,have it,why should they?You not heard of solar sails,antimatter,plasma drives,nuclear propulsion,warp drives?Genuine concept technologies conceived today perhaps birthed tomorrow.We might send machines first,even nanobots,we will get there.

[dutchjohn1952]

Dream on kolonizing our galaxy. You have no idea how remote the nearest star system is in our Milky Way. Our solar system is like the diameter of an atom for an observer from the nearest galaxy. It takes light 100,000 yearsto cross our Milky Way (if not caught in the billions of black holes in our Milky Way). Never ever man will ever be able to actually visit the nearest star system. Not someday but never ever. Nasa is playing within the same mm2 over 50 years. The did NOT make any progress!

[SummerBreeze106]

But we'd hardly be taking trips or attempting to using chemical rockets to the stars, so your point is frankly irrelevant. We will reach the stars, despite it seeming akin to a flea jumping an ocean. Though this vid was not in real time because the transmission takes many minutes to reach Earth from Mars I am still somewhat awed by this. Someday we will live on Mars, and I think Mars will once again become a blue Planet. It'll be a first step on our way to colonising the Galaxy.