Latest Don Hassler Stories
Almost nine months after it was launched, Curiosity, NASA's latest rover, landed safely in the Gale Crater of Mars in the wee hours of August 6 CDT. The last seven minutes were particularly dramatic as the mission executed several complicated maneuvers to deliver the car-sized rover through the thin Martian atmosphere and gently place it in a very specific location. "Although it was nerve-wracking, everyone was confident, and Curiosity landed with amazing precision, right on time!" said...
[ Watch The Video ] When Curiosity enters the Martian atmosphere on August 6th, setting in motion "the seven minutes of terror" that people around the world have anticipated since launch a year ago, the intrepid rover will actually be performing the mission's second daredevil stunt. The first was completed in July. For the past nine months, Curiosity has been acting as a stunt double for astronauts, exposing itself to the same cosmic radiation humans would experience following the...
[ Watch the Video ] With a pair of bug-eyes swiveling on a stalk nearly 8 feet off the ground, the 6-wheeled, 1800-lb Mars rover Curiosity doesn’t look much like a human being. Yet, right now, the mini-Cooper-sized rover is playing the role of stunt double for NASA astronauts. “Curiosity is riding to Mars in the belly of a spacecraft, where an astronaut would be,” explains Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “This means the rover experiences...
The largest solar particle event since 2005 hit the Earth, Mars and the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft travelling in-between, allowing the onboard Radiation Assessment Detector to measure the radiation a human astronaut could be exposed to en route to the Red Planet. On Sunday, a huge coronal mass ejection erupted from the surface of the sun, spewing a cloud of charged particles in our direction, causing a strong "S3" solar storm. A NASA Goddard Space Weather Lab animation of the CME...
On Nov. 26th, Curiosity blasted off from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas 5 rocket. Riding a plume of fire through the blue Florida sky, the car-sized rover began a nine month journey to search for signs of life Mars. Meanwhile, 93 million miles away, a second lesser-noticed Mars launch was underway. Around the time that Curiosity’s rocket was breaking the bonds of Earth, a filament of magnetism erupted from the sun, hurling a billion-ton cloud of plasma (a “CME”) toward the Red...
