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Sky Crane

Mystery Blur in Mars Image Explained

August 11, 2012

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter When Curiosity executed a perfect six-wheel landing on Mars on the morning of August 6 to the excitement of millions worldwide — not to mention quite a few engineers and scientists at JPL — it immediately began relaying images back to [...]

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Curiosity’s Dramatic MARDI Descent Movie

August 7, 2012

Image Caption: Curiosity Heat shield falls away from the bottom of Curiosity and the Sky Crane descent stage in this image from the MARDI camera. Watch the video below. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS As NASA’s Curiosity Mars Science Lab (MSL) was in the final stages of her flawless but harrowing decent to Gale Crater on Mars overnight [...]

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Video: Drop Test for Next Mars Rover’s Sky-Crane Landing System

January 20, 2011

One of the biggest unknowns for the Mars Science Lab — a.k.a Curiosity — is the landing system, called the Sky Crane, which has never been used before for a spacecraft landing on another planet. It is similar to a sky crane heavy-lift helicopter, and it works like this: after a parachute slows the rover’s [...]

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