Phoning Home: Communicating from Mars

How will we know if Curiosity has landed safely on the surface of Mars?

[maraos]

Loved the two moons during the time lapse =]

[busybillyb]

I love how they recycle old but still active probes for new uses such as serving as a communications link to Earth. They're like veterans welcoming a new guy to the field.

[meithan]

It uses three devices known as "momentum wheels", which are heavy rotating discs inside the spacecraft that employ the physics principle known as "conservation of angular momentum" to impart rotation on the spacecraft.

Engineers were a bit concerned because one of the three wheels stopped working when they tried to use it 6 weeks ago (consider Odyssey has been orbiting Mars for 10 years now), but luckily the backup wheel did the trick.

[valaha]

man i was so nervous while live show on landing. Good job guys!

[sikhswim]

Love the style and spirit of this video. So excited to follow the landing!

[toresbe]

That's a well-done video. Popularizing the problem without dumbing it down too much. Thanks.

[MrRtkwe]

In terms of exploration after landing the commands are more "go here" or "perform test X on sample." Which to my knowledge is how the last 2 rovers were controlled most of the time.

[marcusaureliusregulus]

8 years later and perseverance landed successfully with first person footage of landing!!

[MrRtkwe]

Yeah, JPL is pretty good about their software control processes, from what I've read. Definitely once it happened they immediately added a cycle into their software test routines.

[megajacktr]

congrats to JPL and everyone who participated! I was more and more excited as this day was comming, and am unbelievably glad that everything went flawless. But please someone who watched it tell me please, due to being from europe i overslept live stream, was it streamed from headquarters here on earth, or there was camera on rover?

[EasyGamerChannel]

Well it is encrypted. The modulation isn't the object being processed for hours, it is the data being received from the rover that is encrypted. In addition the rover is constantly gathering data(even if we don't know if it has landed or not), it also takes time for the data to travel and be processed.

[markwenefred]

and now we have Perseverance :>>

[MarkCliffeIsGay]

NASA, you truly never cease to amaze me.

[martinasenov]

they didn't mention the 14 minutes signal delay. Even if the vehicle and the satellites manage to dispatch the signal as planned, we still wouldn't know for 14 minutes or so until it gets here

[HrC]

these visual animations make science more fun.

[Hairy]

Wonderful video and explains everything quite well for the lay people. I wish Rover well.

[doggo_s]

There is a live stream, it's even being broadcasted at time square but obviously delayed.

[octagonPerfectionist]

Probably with a big spinning counterweight or something, satellites use those to make small adjustments.

[mindazzas]

There is some theory, but only theory. Curiosity has an equipment to measure the radiation level. What more, there is some craters on Mars, that some astronomers say are unnatural but was made by bomb explosion, such as Nuclear weapon. So they concluded that there is possibility that human came up from Mars to escape radiation and death. One interesting thing. Ancient people wrote that Giants came from Sky and they seeded life, and on Mars with less pressure/gravity people can growth higher.

[NeilThomas]

Yeah, pretty much. For more complicated manuvers they test it with a copy of curiosity on earth before sending the command. There is no real time control