November 28, 2011
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This is not a comet, it's Curiosity on its way to Mars
This, I guarantee, is a view of NASA’s Curiosity rover embarking on its 250 day trip to Mars that you may not have seen before. It’s an extraordinary piece of time-lapse footage taken from Australia not long after launch from Cape Canaveral. It shows a glowing plume from the Centaur stage after a burn over the Indian Ocean – the Centaur rocket has propelled Curiosity first into a low-Earth orbit and then into an escape trajectory towards Mars. You can also see the sunlit spacecraft itself, a tiny speck gliding across the star-fields of the Milky Way as it heads for interplanetary space.
Bon voyage Curiosity!
With thanks to the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium
About the Author: Caleb Scharf is the director of Columbia University's multidisciplinary
Astrobiology Center. He has worked in the fields of observational
cosmology, X-ray astronomy, and more recently exoplanetary science. His book 'Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos' will be available Aug. 7th 2012, and he is working on 'The Copernicus Complex' (both from Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)
Follow on Twitter @caleb_scharf.
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WOW!! Probably the last view of Curiosity until the Mars colonists find the rover. Thanks!
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