MSL “Curiosity” Landing event at the Natural History Museum, London

I joined a tense gathering at the Natural History Museum, just before 6am on Monday 6^th August, waiting to find out if the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) “Curiosity” would make it safely onto the surface of Mars.

Experts Dr Peter Grindrod from UCL, Dr Joe Michalski from the NHM annd Dr Matt Balme from the Open University were on hand as our panel for the morning, to guide and educate us through the landing as it happened.

Dr Peter Grindrod, Dr Joe Michalski, Dr Matt Balme

Having seen NASA’s “7 minutes of terror” video multiple times, I was familiar with the timeline of events. At 6:17am, the landing had already happened, but the nail biting telemetry took an extra 14 minutes to be relayed back to Earth.

Amazingly, they received a low resolution picture from the rear haz camera within minutes of landing. Photographic evidence that a wheel was safely on the surface and the horizon appeared almost flat, confirmed that the rover was alive, well, and appeared to have landed upright in a safe level area.

This video shows the landing, via 297 frames retrieved from the Mars Descent Imager onboard Curiosity.

Talking after landing:

Michalski: "One thing, NASA missions always try to do is to decrease the size of that landing ellipse. As we move towards bigger missions, perhaps a sample return mission, we have to eliminate the uncertainty of landing, we need precision landing."

Balme: "As a scientist we want to go to places but the engineers say you can’t go there, its too dangerous. Anything that’ll improve accuracy means there will be more places that we can go."

Curiosity descending via parachute, imaged by
the HiRISE Camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Peter Grindrod then delivered his presentation.  After all the build up, it was great to hear a presentation finally say “where Curiosity HAS landed!” and “where Curiosity is!”, rather than hope and other sentiments to date.

Grindrod: "One of the reasons that Curiosity is so exciting is the sky crane, the way it landed. There are two main reasons why this was so important:

1)      As Matt said, it allows us to land in a smaller region than ever before. This will mean scientists can access more geologically interesting areas.

2)      Much bigger mass in terms of payload was delivered to the surface, which will lead to better bigger science than ever before. This may well be the next stage of exploration.

Gale Crater elevation map with landing ellipse

 I can safely say this is where Curiosity is on the surface of Mars. This is Gale Crater, an elevation map, where the whites are high and blues are low. You can see the landing ellipse in red, 7 x 20km, which is similar to Camden Town, down to Thames at Westminster, from the Natural History Museum to Heathrow. Gale Crater itself is 155km across. The reason we’re there, is the mound in the middle, 5-6km of layered rock for Curiosity to explore.

No previous ellipses, Viking, Pathfinder, Phoenix were small enough to safely land in this crater. We’ve known about Gale Crater for a long time but just not been able to go there. The mound in the middle is about the same size as the M25, but it would take MSL much longer to drive round the M25!"

"Bridget", Astrium's test rover

Ralph Cordey from Astrium, took the opportunity to tell us a little about their hopes for Exomars, and their test rover, Bridget, was on display.

An informative question and answer session followed, while everyone tried to comprehend what had just happened.  I think many of us had mentally prepared for the worst, and it took the rest of the day and the amazing images released from each new press conference that helped it slowly to sink in.

BBC News spoke to me briefly afterwards and a friend told me later I was on the lunchtime news! I stand by my quote: "Its going to be fantastic science for the next two years, its what NASA needed right now, a real win for them!".

I include a selection of the interesting articles I have read since the landing:

JPL live video during landing.

The three signals Adam Seltzner needed to hear before they would declare landing successful.

One of the first images after Curiosity’s mast went up and NASA’s image gallery.

How Curiosity hit the perfect spot on Mars.

Follow Curiosity on Twitter. Or for some comedy, follow “Sarcastic Rover” on Twitter.

The women behind Curiosity’s tweets.

Computer processing limitations.