Comments on: Curiosity Color Image No. 1 (MAHLI)

By: podrock

podrock — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 03:14:08 +0000

Most of what I see is angular to sub-angular. Maybe some spheres….

By: RobVG

RobVG — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 01:41:24 +0000

Blueberries?

By: alcaray

alcaray — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:21:30 +0000

yea, but you don’t want the instruments to come into contact with ammonia or anything that might result in trace quantities. n/t

By: TB

TB — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 21:56:32 +0000

Hydrazine is a monopropellant.

The trick is keeping it from degrading. Under propellant use, it decomposes via a catalyst into (as I recall) ammonia, nitrogen and hydrogen, evolving heat. It’s toxic as hell in its regular form.

By the time the rover could get there, I would think any loose hydrazine would be long gone.

By: alcaray

alcaray — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:55:31 +0000

…is a normal and important part of the instrument. mahli is located close to the brush/percussive drill instruments that will throw up a lot of dust. In normal operation they will cover and uncover mahli quite frequently (assuming the mechanism works – still have not tested that).

By: Ainz

Ainz — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:11:38 +0000

During the first press conference, the leader of the EDL team said the skycrane had 140 kilos of Hydrazine left in the tanks when it crashed.

When asked by a member of the press, when and if Curiosity would inspect the crash site, a consensus was expressed that exposing the rover to all that Hydrazine was the last thing anyone wanted to do.

I’m wondering if that propellant degrades down to a “safe” level over time?

By: podrock

podrock — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:58:17 +0000

“…let’s go exploring!”

By: TB

TB — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:46:46 +0000

Here. The transparent (and dusty) dust cover is still in place!

By: TB

TB — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:33:01 +0000

The HiRISE site now has detailed pictures of the landing site labeling all the hardware laying around. Hot-linking these heavily-downloaded photos would be useless. I'm downloading them to my computer to see what I can post locally.