[SunkenCiv]

[Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Univ. of Arizona, HiRise-LPL]

[cripplecreek]

[tennmountainman]

Beautiful pic. There has been a LIVE news conference everyday since the landing at 1PM EDT. For those interested, you can catch it on NASA TV or Ustream. They have different team members everyday. Kind of educational to watch. Last about an hour.

[Cedar]

Looks pretty barren. Even Detroit looks better.

[Talisker]

So get this: Curiosity lands, right?

And what does it look like?

The parachute detached and blew away.

The rocket pack detached and flew away.

Curiosity was landed straight down, gently.

So you’re a Martian, and you walk up to it.

A nuclear-powered, laser-armed SUV is just sitting there in the middle of the desert. No rocket, not parachute, no tracks.

Just sitting there.

Where the hell did it come from?

Weird visual, methinks.

[JoeProBono]

[dr_lew]

There's a HiRISE page, The Descent of MSL (Curiosity) Captured by HiRISE, that contains a link to a 540 MB tiff file, "Descent long view", represented here. I won't try to link to it! It takes on the order of an hour to download, or some fraction of an hour if you've got a fast link. If you just click on the link it will try to open it in your window, and this is almost certain to fail for us members of klutz nation. It took me a day or two to realize I needed to right click and select "save" to get a download. It started at about 350 KB/sec, but kept getting slower, and finished at around 140 KB/sec. I think this is some kind of slowpoke penalty in the algorithm.

Anyway, it's worth the trouble. Below at top left you see the APOD in blue outline in a larger context. Bottom left you see THAT image in a larger context, where the chute is barely discernible as a tiny white dot. The Curiosity landing site is in the red circle ( my estimate. ) Then at right is the full view of the tiff at minimum magnification, as it comes up in Windows Photo Viewer. The magnification slide bar takes you all the way down to the pixelated closeup of the chute.

Of course, there are thousands of these kind of views in the HiRISE catalog. AMAZING !!!!