A new NASA video shows the cloud of dust that rose from the surface of the Red Planet after the Curiosity rover’s heat shield hit the Martian terrain during the spacecraft’s descent on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The video was made using a sequence of 25 images taken by the Mars Descent Imager on Curiosity while the rover was still suspended on a parachute, after the spacecraft had jettisoned its heat shield.
A dark spot, the shadow of the heat shield, enters the scene from lower left, moving toward the center. The bright heat shield itself is also apparent just before the shadow and hardware meet in the impact on the surface. The area of ground visible in the images is about six-tenths of a mile (1 kilometer) across. The frames are cropped portions of full-frame images from the Mars Descent Imager.
Watch the full video, which shows the impact at various speeds:
For more information about NASA’s Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl and http://www.nasa.gov/msl
Filed under: Mars
