Category - Blog

NASA’s most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars, including the final severing of the bridle cords and flyaway maneuver of the rocket backpack.

Curiosity landed near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life.

Things went OK with good runs into EU and Asia but not much DX initially. I soon moved up to 17m and worked VK and the odd JA but by 0900 I was settled for a good session on 15m. First in the log was WE8A/ KH0 with a real fb signal followed by plenty in RA, UA and a lot of Western Europe. The band opened to JA and a very good number logged with loud sigs plus several HL. I even managed a 10 watts to 10 Watts qso with JR4DFK – 57 reports both ways – amazing!

I tried 40m about midday but it didn’t ‘do it’ for me so pretty quickly moved back to 17m for another JA opening. I wasn’t disappointed and finished at 1330 with 611 q’s, 155 were Japan. Qsl’s are printed and via MØOXO OQRS.

Not long now to the much anticipated landing on Mars!

Engineers who designed the entry, descent and landing system for NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity candidly talk about the new landing system, and describe the challenges of Curiosity’s final moments before touchdown on Aug. 5, 2012, at 10:31pm PDT.

(Landing takes place about 14 minutes earlier due to the communications delay.)

Click here to see the Video and get the date in your diaries!

This image shows the volcanic peak Idunn Mons (at 46 degrees south latitude, 214.5 degrees east longitude) in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The topographic backbone derives from data obtained by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, with a vertical exaggeration of 30 times. Radar data (in brown) from Magellan has been draped on top of the topographic data. Bright areas are rough or have steep slopes. Dark areas are smooth.

The Video link (see link below) shows the heat patterns derived from surface brightness data collected by the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS), aboard the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft. Temperature variations due to topography were removed. The brightness signals the composition of the minerals that were changed due to lava flow. Red-orange is the warmest area and purple is the coolest. The warmest area is centered on the summit, which stands about 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) above the plains, and the bright flows that originate there. Idunn Mons has a diameter of about 200 kilometers (120 miles). Click here to see recent lava flows on the surface of Venus revealed in a 360-degree view of the planet’s volcanic peak.

This weekend Andrew and his team will be QRV from Fraser Island (OC-142) as VK4NM/p.

Andrew tells us ”This is primarily for the IOTA contest but we will also be qrv a day either side. ”                            

”Please listen out for us. We have a special QSL card for the activation which can be requested via my Manager M0OXO”.

This station also valid for WFF Awards (area VKFF-216).

For Qsl requests please click here for OQRS Direct and Bureau.

I have a supply of used and correctly stamped IRC’s (International Reply Coupons) For Sale should anyone need any.

Cost is £1.10 each plus postage to your QTH.

If you wish to pay by any other means  (Paypal etc) then please contact me on this link for details.

NASA’s twin STEREO probes and the European Space Agency’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory monitored the CME as it billowed away from the sun.  Using those data, analysts at NOAA and NASA successfully predicted the cloud’s arrival time.  It would take almost two full days for the CME to cross the 93 million mile void between Earth and sun.

The CME’s impact sharply compressed Earth’s magnetosphere, briefly exposing geosynchronous satellites to solar wind plasma.  The shaking of Earth’s magnetic field caused compass needles to swing–just a little–and prompted electrical currents to flow through the soil at high latitudes.  Fortunately, the strike did no harm; satellites survived and power grids stayed online.

Next came the light show.  As the CME’s wake washed across Earth, the polar regions of our planet lit up like a Christmas tree.  Red, green, blue and purple auroras capped both ends of the planet, glowing, dancing, and ultimately spreading to places where auroras are seldom seen.

In Arkansas, for instance, “there was a faint glow off and on for most of the night,” reports Brad Emfinger from a little town called Ozark. “Around 3am there was an outburst of red and purple plainly visible to the naked eye.”

In Pawnee Grasslands, Colorado, photographer Robert Arn saw the Northern Lights for the first time ever: “As soon as I stepped out of the car, the sky looked like it was on fire. Then the Moon, Venus and Jupiter rose together in the east. To see the conjunction and the auroras side-by-side was incredible!”

Meanwhile at the other end of the planet, “auroras were going crazy over the South Pole,” reports Robert Schwarz at the Amundsen-Scott south pole research station “We enjoyed the show under crystal clear skies with an air temperature of minus 105 degrees F.”

From one end of the planet to the other, spanning more than 90 degrees of combined north-south latitude, 183 degrees of temperature, and 360 degrees of longitude, this was truly a global space weather event.

And it was just a taste of things to come.