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Microcap & Penny Stocks : TGL WHAAAAAAAT! Alerts, thoughts, discussion. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Bishop who wrote (125667)	1/4/2004 12:12:57 AM
From: Rocket Red	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 150070

NASA rover lands safely on Mars Spirit spacecraft bounces on surface, sends back signals NASA TV Mission managers Richard Cook, Rob Manning and Wayne Lee cheer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., after the rover sends a signal back confirming its safe landing. FREE VIDEO • Live coverage Go to MSN Video to watch Mars missions unfold on NASA TV By Alan Boyle Science editor MSNBC Updated: 12:07 a.m. ET Jan. 04, 2004NASA mission managers said the first of twin Mars rovers streaked down safely to a "bull's-eye" landing in Gusev Crater on Saturday night. Minutes after its scheduled landing, a carrier signal confirmed that the Spirit spacecraft had landed intact and right side up. advertisement Saturday's landing marks the beginning of NASA's first exploration of the Martian surface since 1997's wildly successful Mars Pathfinder mission — and marks another step in the search for traces of ancient water and perhaps ancient life on Mars. Controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., whooped and hugged each other shortly before 9 p.m. PT (midnight ET) when they heard that a UHF carrier tone from Spirit was received at the Goldstone radio telescope in California. Plenty could have gone wrong during the final stage of the rover's seven-month, 300-million-mile (480-million-kilometer) trip to the Red Planet — a descent through the atmosphere that NASA's associate administrator for space science, Ed Weiler, called "six minutes from hell." FREE VIDEO • Countdown to Mars NASA is about to land its Mars rover to search for life on the Red Planet. NBC's Jay Barbree reports. Nightly News On the way down, the spacecraft's heat shield weathered more than 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,450 degrees Celsius) during the plunge through Mars' thin atmosphere. That friction slowed down Spirit, wrapped in its landing shell, from a speed of 12,000 mph to 1,000 mph (19,200 to 1,600 kilometers per hour). Retro rockets and a parachute slowed the descent even more. About 50 feet (15 meters) above the Martian surface, airbags inflated around the rover and its shell to cushion the impact. Protected by the airbags, the spacecraft could have bounced as high as a four-story building, rolling to a stop as much as a half-mile (1 kilometer) from the initial impact. But even if everything up to that point worked perfectly, strong cross winds and a particularly sharp rock could have blown a gaping hole in the plan.