Curiosity's heat shield drops away as the rover images its own descent to Mars{credit}NASA/JPL-Caltech{/credit}
What’s better than landing on Mars? If you’re Michael Malin, head of the Mars Decent Imager (MARDI) on board NASA’s Curiosity rover, the answer is shooting video as you take the plunge.
At an 6 August press briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Malin proudly unveiled this preliminary look at what it’s like to be in the driver’s seat when touching down on another planet. Malin first imagined the camera that could do the job more than a decade ago, and he has been waiting to try it ever since.
MARDI is attached to the underside of Curiosity. As the rover drifted down on its parachute during yesterday’s landing, the camera switched on automatically just 6 seconds before heat-shield separation.
After a few frames of darkness, the video shows the protective shield falling away. Down below, the rover’s landing site looms ever closer, erupting in a cloud of disturbed dust when the rover is close enough to blast the surface with its descent stage rockets.
The rover is then enveloped by the maelstrom of swirling dust, which settles out to reveal the pebbled surface of Gale Crater, just inches below the now-stationary camera.
“I never though there would be so much dust,” says Malin, “but otherwise it was pretty much as expected.”
The video is not just a visual record of the rover’s descent. The detailed view it offers of the area immediately around the landing site will serve as a guide during Curiosity’s first month or so of exploration, when it will confine itself to short traverses within a fairly small area around its landing spot.
The individual frames of the video taken just before the dust started to billow “are much higher resolution than we could get from orbit,” says Malin, “so they’ll be useful during the early stage of the mission.”
Today’s first glimpse of the video is just a teaser made up of a few low-resolution stills strung together like stop-action animation. Over the coming days and weeks, all the higher-resolution frames that MARDI captured will be relayed back to Earth and assembled into a less jerky and far sharper video of the descent.