Perseverance pays off!

New flash for all PSA community space cadets: NASAs Perseverance rover sends back its first images.

Blog: First Image From Perseverance on Mars – Perseverance Mars Rover (nasa.gov)

Perseverance is by far the most sophisticated rover ever built. The mission even includes the Mars Helicopter, the first drone to be deployed on an extra-terrestrial body. I lucked out during a JPL business visit getting to see the chassis driven down the main road of the Lab. At that time it was partially built including the drive train. The technicians were driving the bad boy between buildings - I’m sure there was more than a small amount of show it off pride involved. You have to see Perseverance to appreciate how massive this latest rover is. Another day of pride for NASA and the American space program. Kudos to the entire engineering and science team. Can’t wait to see what Perseverance discovers!

6 Likes

And the drilling and collection of soil samples to be sent back for analysis in about 10 years! Long term thinking.

4 Likes

Fascinating website. They need to speed things up a bit.

1 Like

We’ve sure come a long since this…

1877 map of Mars by Giovanni Schiaparelli.

Cannot wait for Perseverance’s results and for the Webb telescope launch/deployment.
Exciting times !

4 Likes

I’m so excited about Webb. I have a personal investment in Webb. While working at GSFC I was on the team that did the IR detector vendor survey for selection, which included on-sites at the competing manufacturers. My current company was one of the two competitors to build demonstrators of the segmented, actively controlled figure primary mirror. There are very few companies anywhere in the world capable of designing and building a large, space qualified, actuated segmented primary mirror. It is derived from military applications. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I was always into the "space race’. My uncle was an engineer working on the lunar model for Grumman on Long Island back in the 60’s; complete with white shirt, bowtie and pocket protector! I had model rockets from Estes in Colorado, that I built and launched. So much fun!

1 Like

Who got a bad press because he called those things channels that got mistranslated as canals and for a long time people thought there were rivers on Mars. … who was the uncle of Elsa Schiaparelli, the famous designer. Apparently they were very close and a remarkable family.

There is a bar in Scotland called Elsa’s, at the Fife Arms Hotel, in her honour and with several of her designs (and pictures by Bellmer and Man Ray). I took a picture as I remember thinking when sitting down, don’t spill anything on that chair as it should be in a museum.

2 Likes

There is a lot of Danish-developed equipment built into the robot, which will hopefully land on Mars on Thursday night, where it will search for life. And Danish companies should do even more to get involved in the space, says Denmark’s largest business organization, because it saves both money and jobs.

Microphones from Danish DPA Microphones must ensure that we can hear for the first time what it sounds like when a vessel lands on Mars.

From Mozart to Mars
The Danish sound recording equipment, which in contrast to much other equipment on the space mission, is actually standard equipment. It consists of DPA’s 4006 ball microphone, an MMA-A digital converter and an MMP-G modular active cable.

(Texas has no electricity … Houston we have problems …)

3 Likes

My uncle was also an engineer with Grumman in the 60’s until they moved. I also did the Estes model rockets and used to launch them from the commuter parking lot at SUNY Stony Brook. Grew up in Hauppauge.

Interesting bit of info. Thanks for that. I became curious about her and did a little google searching.

She was quite a talent and a woman of her time. In a description of her early adulthood, her and her husband Count Wilhelm Wendt de Kerlor, after two years of marriage moved to New York City. And as written, “The young couple lived on Elsa’s dowry, which was disappearing at the speed of light”. I found that amusing, never having heard of spending money to quite such extremes.

But to be the first woman to be on the American cover of Time Magazine is quite an achievement. And to think that the color “Shocking Pink” was her bit of doing and which has been immortalized as a Crayola Crayon color since the 70’s.

Loved Hauppauge back then. Less developed and very bucolic. I was a south shore boy, from Copiague. I used to work for a band that had a rehearsal space at Gyrodine’s Flowerfield location.
I would drive back home from there in the wee hours of the morning in my in '77 Spitfire convertible, just marveling at the open spaces and sweet summer air. Sometimes we’d head over to see Twisted Sister when they would play at a large club in Smithtown. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name; but it could hold over 500 people easily. I’d forgotten all about those times.

1 Like

I attended the University of Arizona in Tucson. They had a huge telescope on campus. I was so amazed by that. I would see it on my daily excursions to and from classes. Also, some of the professors were affiliated with the Kitt Peak Observatory just outside of Tucson.
I remember one of my professors getting all excited about Voyager 1, which had just taken off that week. To think it took years to get to it’s first destination. PATIENCE and preservice in that instance.

There were two other remarkable women of that period, both Russian and based in Paris, Sonia Delaunay and Natalia Goncharova. My wife wrote a thesis about Goncharova, and I was aware of her through her work for Ballets Russes. The breadth of their work from fashion, theatre design, publishing, interior design, painting and sculpture, you name it, they did it, often in collaboration with the great (male) artists of the day. They were all in bed with each other, Picasso married the principal dancer in a BR ballet for which he designed the sets. Dora Maar, a surrealist painter but also a remarkable photographer, she had a major exhibition in London 3 years ago, she’d documented poverty in the London in the 1930s. Rather more recent, and a bloke, but I saw this a couple of years ago and it stopped me in my tracks. People like this are the real talent that keep the world ticking for me.

2 Likes

That’s not Twisted Sister… :smirk:

Another NASA milestone to celebrate. The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter just completed the first controlled flight on another planet early this morning Eastern Time! Remarkable for a 1% atmosphere, How I wish I was at the Lab today, the place must be rocking. Well done to the entire engineering and science team!!

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Succeeds in Historic First Flight | NASA

2 Likes

This is incredible and silly exciting. I was amazed when I learned there is only 1% of the equivalent of Earth’s atmosphere with which to work.

1 Like