Four cameras were developed by local company for NASA


A camera on the spacecraft Curiosity captured the rover’s wild descent to the surface of Mars late Sunday night, thrilling NASA scientists who watched a heat shield peel away from the probe and dust kick up as the 2,000-pound vehicle reached the ground.



Curiosity kept sending NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory “heart tones,” or signals that let anxious controllers know that the spacecraft was still operating after an eight-month, 352 million-mile journey. There were no glitches — something scientists found hard to fathom until Monday when JPL began releasing images.

One of the first shots came from the 7-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying 211 miles directly overhead, that showed Curiosity hanging from a parachute as it descended toward the planet. NASA then released images from the Malin descent camera that showed the planet becoming progressively larger in the seconds before touchdown.

The low-resolution images — which will be enhanced into high-resolution pictures in coming days — showed the stark outline of dark sand dunes in the Gale crater region. The camera also showed dust swirling from the surface of Mars just before Curiosity reached the ground, barely one mile from Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall mountain that will be the focus of this mission.


Curiosity landed on largely flat ground with a very pebbly texture, which could be the result of erosion. That stirred excitement. The two-year mission is designed to look for signs of past and current water, and whether there is any evidence that life does or did exist on the fourth planet from the sun.

NASA gave an intriguing look at what literally lies ahead. It released a surface image from Curiosity that shows Mount Sharp with a white peak. That could be a sign of frost or snow, or it could be distortion caused by the compressed nature of the image that was released.

NASA plans to release more images this week, possibly including the first panoramic shot. But it will be weeks before Curiosity can begin its ambitious science mission, which involves rolling across the planet’s hardscrabble surface to objects of interest. The rover can scale objects up to 25 inches high, and there will be days that it will travel more than twice the length of a football field.


