Questions tagged [curiosity]
Questions regarding the Curiosity rover launched by NASA for the purpose of Mars exploration.
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Why does the Curiosity rover camera image resolution have "milliradians" as a unit?
NASA's published specs for the Curiosity rover cameras says that the image resolution is in milliradians per pixel. Which is odd because image resolution is measured in physical size units, i.e. ...
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Why wasn't the MSL landing ellipse in Gale Crater placed further South?
This paper documents the final landing site selection process for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. One of the cons associated with Gale Crater (as pointed out in Table 10 of the paper), was ...
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Why did Spirit (MER-A) lose a wheel?
I was watching a documentary called Expedition Mars: Spirit and Opportunity (It's really good, I recommend it, you can find it on Disney+) and it said Spirit lost control of its frontmost right side ...
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Rover wheel placement
Why are the center wheels of the Curiosity rover not in line with the chassis?
I understand when turning, one side is in line with an arc it will make. Would the other side's wheels not be on the same ...
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Is there any chance that Opportunity survived, but NASA kept pinging it at the wrong time?
In 2018, NASA's beloved little Opportunity (oppy) was declared dead after a dust storm "killed" it. It may still be OK, but when NASA began recovery effort, they pinged oppy when it was ...
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Is my calculation of the current day/sol of current Mars month accurate?
I'm working on providing Mars related data for a project.
I'm using 2 points of data that are available to me from Rover Environmental Monitoring Station at the Centro de Astrobiologia.
The 2 data ...
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Why did Curiosity perform TCMs?
Why did Curiosity perform TCM (Trajectory Correction Maneuver)s 1 through 5? 6 makes sense since it needed to adjust course to actually once in the SOI, but the others don't. I understand that this ...
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Could and should not the search for the location(s) of the Martian methane spikes become the main scientific objective for the Curiosity rover?
In Nature Geoscience's article Independent confirmation of a methane spike on Mars and a source region east of Gale Crater is announced that the reported methane spike on sol 305 by the Tunable Laser ...
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Do Curiosity and Perseverance have gyrocompasses? Has any rover had one? If so, what kind and how do they work?
There is discussion of a gyrocompass in comments on the page How does Curiosity know how to point and move it's high gain antenna in real time? but so far I don't think there is a hard "Yes&...
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Are there any selfies of Curiosity or Perseverance with their high gain antenna deployed and "looking up"?
The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have high gain antenna arrays on a mechanical arm that can rise up and point towards Earth and communicate directly.
Has the Curiosity rover ever communicated ...
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How many watts of electricity are available for systems during a Mars transit?
The 40+ year old Voyager probes have three Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) currently producing 249 watts, losing around 4 watts per year. They began with 470 Watts.
The Curiosity Rover's ...
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What is MAHLI's theoretical or expected best optical resolution? How was it defined? Was it verified on Mars?
The block quote in this answer to Has Curiosity ever taken a good hard look at the dirt covering its top surface? Can it? Have individual particles been sized? says that at a focus distance of 2.5 ...
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Does Perseverance have a SAM-like instrument? [duplicate]
Curiosity had an instrument called SAM onboard that did gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. Do any of the instruments on Perseverance include these capabilities? If not, why were they deemed ...
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What are the maximum data capacities of the active rovers on Mars?
Many rovers have been sent to Mars and, as now, some are still working there. Does anyone know the maximum data capacity of each active rover?
Curiosity
Perseverance
Zhurong
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After nine years on Mars, has anything on Curiosity broken yet?
As per Wikipedia's Curiosity (rover), it landed nine years ago today at 6 August 2012, 05:17:57 UTC.
This is yet another testament to NASA spacecraft reliability.
Since landing, has anything actually ...
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