What’s this? Oh nothing, just A SPACESHIP LANDING ON MARS, PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANOTHER SPACESHIP ORBITING MARS!
In case you’ve been living under a rock, or watching Olympics 24-7, yesterday the Mars Rover Curiosity/Mars Science Laboratory landed safely on the Red Planet, via an amazing ‘sky-crane’ manoeuvre from its host spacecraft. The photo above captures it parachuting towards the Martian surface, as imaged by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (and the HiRISE team now think they’ve also spotted the craft’s discarded heat-shield falling in the same shot). Though this isn’t the first time that HiRISE has captured such a stunning shot – a couple of years ago it did the same in this spectacular image of the Phoenix lander descending onto Mars.
And if that wasn’t enough for you, the Curiosity team have now released time-lapse footage of the rover’s landing, from its own perspective:
I’m looking forward to keeping a close eye on Curiosity’s investigation of our neighbouring planet. You can too, via the official NASA Mars Science Laboratory website.
