Well that was exciting! The test of a spacecraft impact on an asteroid (actually, a small asteroid orbiting a larger one). The image is of the surface a fraction of a second before impact.
Details from NASA here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/dart-s-final-images-prior-to-impact
This amazing vehicle has taken another step forward; it now flies and has landed safely, still using the same manoeuvre to get from horizontal to vertical just before landing.
Here’s the video:
It will be interesting to see what they manage next. It’s going to be a while before they get this into orbit.
Flying the Ingenuity helicopter carried on the NASA Perseverence rover is quite a feat. It has to be done completely autonomously; Mars is currently over half an hour away for round trip radio signals, so remote control is not an option. There’s no GPS to help navigation either!
A pity they couldn’t have tracked it off to the right as well, but at least it came back!
Here’s the mission website: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
This is amazing – they are getting so close to having this amazing vehicle working. Maybe SpaceX will be on the Moon before the planned NASA mission for 2024? OK, rapid unplanned disassembly at the end, but so nearly there. The manoeuvre from horizontal flight to vertical for landing is quite a shock!
In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission – here’s my Saturn V model appropriately posed! Continue reading
Yay! It will be fun to follow this even if I can’t actually go. See
