-
A new Cité de l'Espace
The space adventure park in Toulouse has completely redesigned and renewed its permanent exhibitions. The result is an interactive immersion into man's enthusiasm for the stars.
-
@explorezmars: Curiosity live!
On Monday 6 August the Mars rover Curiosity should land on the red planet. From today Enjoy Space and Cité de l’Espace are offering you the chance to follow this event on Twitter, and then by video, direct from the NASA JPL in California!
-
Soyuz in Guiana
This is the mythical rocket par excellence, the one that launched Sputnik, the first satellite and Gagarin, the first man in space. The CSG, Guiana Space Centre, is now one of its launch bases: a historic achievement.
7 minutes of terror
“7 minutes of terror” would, no doubt, make a gripping title for a horror film or a thriller aiming for a smash hit at the box office. But these 7 minutes are actually those that the Martian rover Curiosity will be subjected to during its so-called EDL, Entry Descent and Landing, phase. In fact, as soon as Curiosity comes into contact with the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere, a rapid sequence of complex, automatic operations will take place, ending with the landing in the targeted area of Gale crater. NASA’s JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains via interviews and a dynamic montage what these 7 minutes of terror include. It is clear that these few minutes are where the mission is most at risk and where not even the slightest error in calculation is allowed! See the video below.
However, these 7 minutes of terror are nothing new as the American Space Agency has already used this communication gimmick for other Martian probes. The film below is based on the same concept, but is devoted to Phoenix, a probe that landed successfully in the north of Mars on 25 March 2008.
Published on 26 June 2012
