by The Design
minutes after landing, was a tiny 64-pixel-square thumbnail from the rear Hazcam that
was nevertheless big enough to show the horizon, the sky very brightly lit by the afternoon Sun, and in the shadows a wheel clearly sat on the surface. “We are wheels down on Mars,”
an engineer stated into the microphone. The celebration on Earth for that first photo was
even louder than that for the successful landing (Figure 2.32). By the time Odyssey set below the horizon, it had returned a 256-pixel-square version of the same image, as well
61 NASA (2012b)
62 Way et al (2013)
63 John Grotzinger told me this after the end of the press briefing on August 6, 2012
102 Getting to Mars
Figure 2.32. MSL team members in the Mission Support Area celebrate after the successful landing and return of the first tiny Hazcam image, which is barely visible on the screen in the background. NASA photographer Bill Ingalls stood on a table and poked his camera above a similar monitor to catch the team’s reaction in this photo.
as a view from the front Hazcam (Figure 2.33). The images were mottled with dust, some of it still swirling in the air, some of it stuck to the lens caps on the Hazcams.
Curiosity lost contact with both Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey at
about the same time, at 05:23:53, as both spacecraft set below the horizon. Contact with
Odyssey was lost earlier than expected because the spacecraft had gone slightly long,
causing Odyssey to set behind the peak of the mountain at the center of the crater. Already Curiosity was on its own, on the far side of Mars, out of contact with Earth.
Two hours later, Odyssey passed above the horizon to the west of the landing site. In
the intervening time, Curiosity had stored additional Hazcam images, taken both before
and after releasing their lens caps. A close look at the new rear Hazcam image revealed
something astonishing: a feature visible on the horizon in the image taken immediately
after landing was no longer visible in an image taken an hour later. The smudge on the
horizon in the first photo returned from Mars was later determined to be the plume of dust
rising from the impact site of the descent stage, 650 meters away (Figure 2.34).
The cruise stage, aeroshell, and descent stage had all done their work admirably. The
rover, on Mars, still had the brains of an interplanetary spacecraft. The next major task for the mission was to teach the spacecraft to become a Mars rover.
2.4 Curiosity on Mars 103
Figure 2.33. MSL’s first views of its landing site. Top: Rear Hazcam (RLA_397502188EDR_
D0010000AUT_04096M1), taken at 5:18:39, less than a minute after landing. Bottom: Front Hazcam (FLA_397502305EDR_D0010000AUT_04096M1), taken at 5:20:37, about 3 minutes after landing. NASA/JPL-Caltech photos.
104 Getting to Mars
Figure 2.34. Cropped sections from two rear Hazcam images from landing day. Left: RLA_397502188EDR_D0010000AUT_04096M1, taken at 5:18:39, less than a minute after
landing, includes a lumpy plume on the horizon, in the right direction to be the impact plume from the descent stage; the air appears to be cloudy with dust thrown up by the landing rockets. Right: the same region from RLA_397504876EDR_F0010000AUT_04096M1, taken
about an hour later at 6:03:26, contains no such plume. Bright dots near the image center are internal reflections within the camera caused by the bright Sun being in the camera field of view. NASA/JPL-Caltech.
2.5 EPILOGUE: VIEWS OF THE CRUISE HARDWARE
The day after the landing, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE imaged the landing
site again, catching all of the hardware on the ground (Figure 2.35). The rover was visible as a box on the surface, the descent rocket blast zone surrounding it like but-terfly wings. The lighter-colored impingement zones of the four canted descent rock-
ets looked like lighter dots on the wings (Figure 2.36). The crash sites of the heat shield, descent stage, and parachute were arrayed around the rover. The descent stage
was marked with an extended spray of ejecta more than 100 meters long. Engineers
suspect that its remaining fuel may have detonated on impact, blasting the spacecraft
to pieces.
Since the landing, HiRISE has imaged the landing site regularly while monitoring the
rover traverse, seeing the parachute blowing around over time. Post-landing HiRISE
images of landing hardware are listed in Table 2.3.
Figure 2.36. Detail view of MSL landing hardware on the surface on sol 1. All scale bars are 20
meters long. Upper left: descent stage impact site. Upper right: rover. Lower left: backshell and parachute. Lower right: heat shield. HiRISE image ESP_028269_1755. NASA/JPL- Caltech/UA.
Figure 2.35. HiRISE image of the MSL landing site, sol 1 (August 7, 2012). The impact sites of the backshell, descent stage, and parachute are to the left of the blast zone that marks the rover, uprange; the heat shield is downrange, to the right. HiRISE image ESP_028269_1755.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA.
106 Getting to Mars
en.
ow color
ge was tak
Heat shield
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
–
–
color
gray
gray
gray
–
–
–
–
xcept for a narr
Landing site
gray
color
color
color
gray
–
gray
gray
color
gray
gray
gray
color
gray
–
ayscale e
e gr
ges ar
Backshell
gray
gray
gray
color
gray
gray
color
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
ge is indicated.
ge. HiRISE ima
verhead the orbiter was at the moment the ima
ectly o
Descent stage
gray
gray
gray
color
gray
gray
color
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
gray
e of how dir
grees)
ay”) or color parts of the ima
esolution, less-distorted ima-r
9
3
2
4
8
3
2.6
2.7
ayscale only (“gr
Emission angle (de
45
30
10
17
17
10
14
oduces a higher
1
6
11
27
32
113
129
145
157
479
538
597
672
911
e. Emission angle is a measur
Sol
1556
dwar
verhead and pr
e is visible in the gr
dwar
2012
2012
2014
&nbs
p; ectly o
2012
v 2012
e dir
Date
7 Aug
12 Aug
17 Aug
2 Sep 2012
8 Sep 2012
30 No
16 Dec 2012
2 Jan 2013
13 Jan 2013
11 Dec 2013
10 Feb 2014
11 Apr
27 Jun 2014
28 Feb 2015
21 Dec 2016
ges of landing har
HiRISE ima
Table 2.3.
Lower emission angle is mor
strip at the center; whether the har
Image
ESP_028269_1755
ESP_028335_1755
ESP_028401_1755
ESP_028612_1755
ESP_028678_1755
ESP_029746_1755
ESP_029957_1755
ESP_030168_1755
ESP_030313_1755
ESP_034572_1755
ESP_035350_1755
ESP_036128_1755
ESP_037117_1755
ESP_040269_1755
ESP_048774_1755
2.6 References 107
2.6 REFERENCES
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108 Getting to Mars
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3
Mars Operations
3.1 INTRODUCTION
Operating a lander is quite different from operating an orbiter or flyby craft. Navigators
steer orbiters’ paths long in advance, so scientists can plan observations months ahead.
Rovers don’t have the luxury of predictability. Each day’s activities can’t be planned until controllers back on Earth have received data that tell them the condition and state of the
spacecraft, and the lay of the landscape surrounding it. A team can do strategic planning –
make a list of top-level science goals – in advance, but to accomplish the strategic plan, the team has to develop a new tactical plan each Martian sol. To make things more complicated, Martian sols are not quite the same length as Earth days.
NASA performed tactical planning for the first time on another world with the Surveyor
lunar landers, and later with the Viking and Pathfinder landers, but tactical planning was
elevated to an art form with the Mars Exploration Rovers. Over a decade of mission opera-
tions, the Spirit and Opportunity teams perfected a way of planning the daily operations of a rover on another world, beginning by working on “Mars time,” then switching to an
