Confirmed: Mars rover Curiosity took photo of craft crash-landing
By Scott Gold and Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times
August 10, 2012, 7:55 p.m.
Engineers said Friday that the Curiosity rover happened to catch a picture of its own ride crash-landing on Mars a wink-of-an-eye serendipity that some dismissed as a statistical impossibility, but appears to have been confirmed by a thorough review of landing data.
The final seconds of Curiosity's eight-month-plus journey to Mars called for a spacecraft to lower the rover to the surface using a "sky crane" three ropes. The ropes were then cut, and the last of the spacecraft, known as the "descent stage," cast itself toward the horizon. It crash-landed, on purpose, about 2,000 feet away.
A low-resolution photograph Curiosity took seconds after landing Sunday night arrived promptly at La Cañada Flintridge's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the $2.5-billion mission for NASA.
The photograph captured a pyramid-shaped blotch on the horizon. The same photo taken 45 minutes later with the same cameras showed the same view of the Martian landscape, but no blotch.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-me-0811-mars-curiosity-photo-confirmed-20120811,0,5983256.story