Talk:Curiosity (rover)

As of 6 August 2012, with the successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, this article has been split from the Mars Science Laboratory article. This topic was discussed on the Talk:Mars Science Laboratory Talk page in the weeks leading up to the landing. The rationale was topic breadth. With the successful landing, it seemed that a new article to focus on the:

• planetary science aspects of the robotic rover surface science mission— named Curiosity rover—would be in order.

... while retaining the descriptive aspects of the

• spaceflight mission— entitled Mars Science Laboratory (the actual name of the spaceflight mission, as assigned by NASA), describing the launch, transit to Mars, the novel Entry and Descent through the Martian atmosphere and the Landing on the Martian surface (collectively, the spaceflight: launch, transit, and EDL).

Consensus was achieved to split the articles into two, immediately after the SUCCESSFUL landing of the rover. The payload of the spaceflight mission, the Curiosity rover, has now landed successfully on Mars. Time to split the article. Cheers. N2e (talk) 05:55, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

See notes on some summarising and moving of text from MSL article to rover article at Talk:Mars Science Laboratory#Article split—6 August 2012. Note the rover article needs a section on the robot arm. -84user (talk) 12:38, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

FWIW - Congratulations On The Excellent Article Split - Article Looks Great - Thanks To All For The Excellent Effort - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 14:53, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, Dr. B, I think the planning and pre-landing consensus made the article much better sooner than had we not done all that work. N2e (talk) 15:02, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Looking at this, I think it's important to settle on where all the data (and hypotheses to be tested) should go. For example, right now I'm looking at a NASA slideshow about how Gale Crater was, it is hypothesized, completely filled up over 2 billion years by water- and then wind-mediated mechanisms, then re-excavated leaving only a little (huge) mountain in the middle. [1] Curiosity will presumably be testing this, starting with those lowest water-influenced layers. Now I'm thinking that probably the best thing is to put it all in Gale Crater itself, and only use a pretty brief summary of that here on the rover article and also on the MSL article. Does that seem right to you? Wnt (talk) 14:53, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Yes, some information on the geology of Gale Crater should be mentioned here, as it is the main subject of study for this mission. As the mission develops, we may add a section here on the rover's most outstanding planetary science results (maybe with a link to the appropriate section in the Gale Crater article). If/when that section grows in significant content, we may want to create its own article, we'll have to see how the discoveries & article evolve. Cheers, BatteryIncluded (talk) 15:03, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

I concur. Seems like Gale Crater is the great place to start, for the detail, while of course this article would clearly want to list/summarize and link to the detail. Also agree that it will evolve in a bottom-up way as the data and science results emerge. N2e (talk) 18:00, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

I have invited the folks from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Solar System to weigh in, if they are interested in the topic. N2e (talk) 18:03, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

I concur. IMHO, we should not make (have made) the Curiosity rover page be the site collecting the science results of the mission, especially not as they drizzle in. That should go in a separate Results Of The Mars Science Laboratory Mission page or at least in such a section. Details that are relevant to this mission but really regard some fundamental data (like, for example, the diameter of Gale, or a measure of the sulfur content at the landing site) should go to the article describing the “owning entity” of that property (in the example case, Gale Crater), since the diamater of Gale, and the chemical composition of it's soil is a property of Gale, and not the rover. In fact, readers understand that, and will navigate accordingly naturally. It might be ok if it's just a quick fact in some prose (e. g. (obviously) “Curiosity landed within a 20 km ellipse inside the 154 km Gale Crater, on Mars”). Indeed, I do think that this article has become too broad a subject already if we stick to it covering the whole surface mission. I strongly believe that it would be quite beneficial to spit this into an Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) Surface Mission article covering the mission timeline, events, and results, and this Curiosity Rover article covering the rover as the robot object it is, thus referring (and sticking) mostly it's technical properties, and technical events directly related to it like the time of deployment of the high gain antenna. Both pages should link each other in the summary, I'd say, being to aspects of a greater whole. Let's all try to be pretty judicious as to what bits of information are rover mission (science) things (like events, or discoveries made utilizing it), and what's rover (engineering) stuff (like it's instruments and how they work). Flexx (talk) 18:21, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Tell me what will be discovered and I'll tell you the articles' format.  :-) BatteryIncluded (talk) 18:49, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

I believe the guy in the live stream said the touchdown was at 10:14:39 PDT (05:14:39 UTC). Kaldari (talk) 06:24, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I think I heard that too. But the landing time will soon be confirmed in many reliable sources, and we'll get the article times all correct. N2e (talk) 06:38, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Would the landing time be the time that Curiosity's data reached Earth, or the actual time it landed, approximately 14 minutes earlier?    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 18:53, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

It is the time of signal reception on Earth. BatteryIncluded (talk) 18:56, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

5:14:39 UTC as a landing time is probably about 3.5 minutes wrong; see my notes in the TALK section of the MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY article. Actual landing time was probably around 5:17-5:18 UTC SCET (SpaceCraft Event Time), or 5:31-5:32 UTC ERT (Earth Received Time), and both of these times are probably accurate to no more than +/- 1 minute. The OneWay Lightspeed Time (OWLT) at the time of landing was given by JPL as "13.8 minutes" in a pre-landing press release (see my reference in TALK/MSL), which would be 13 minutes 48 +/- 6 seconds, although I'm sure it's known to a far greater accuracy than that. Remember that SCET + OWLT = ERT, and times must be specified not only as PDT or UTC, but also as SCET or ERT. As I noted in TALK/MSL, for now the landing time should probably read only as 5:17-5:18 UTC SCET, until reliable sources (i.e. NASA/JPL sources) come up with a to-the-second set of numbers. Could someone routinely working on both articles make the appropriate changes? Many thanks. Lanephil (talk) 07:09, 7 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Re "File:NASA Curiousity, first image without dust cover.jpg|thumb|First image from Curiosity rover" - Shouldnt the image be moved to Wikimedia Commons? I dont know how.(mercurywoodrose)99.101.139.124 (talk) 06:44, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Nevermind, just found it there, replaced with WC image.(merc)99.101.139.124 (talk) 06:47, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

It is on commons. :) -- A Certain White Cat ^chi? 09:53, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Uploaded/Added newly released NASA image "File:Mars_Science_Laboratory_Lander_from_HiRISE.JPG" of Curiosity rover landing on Mars as imaged by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - please feel free to adj/modify/etc image of course - also, moving image to Wikimedia Commons is ok as well (haven't yet found an easy way of doing this) - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 19:00, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Brief followup - moving "File:Mars_Science_Laboratory_Lander_from_HiRISE.JPG" to Wikimedia Commons may be moot since this may have already just been done w/ "File:Curiosity_parachute.png" - updated the article image accordingly w/ this newer one - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 19:14, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

From above:

"rover article needs a section on the robot arm. -84user (talk) 12:38, 6 August 2012 (UTC) "

I agree. I am starting a new section on the Talk page with your comment to ensure it gets appropriate attention from all the eyes that will be on this article in the next few days and weeks. Cheers. N2e (talk) 15:00, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

The article says that the plutonium pellets are "each about the size of a marshmallow." Perhaps also a less US-cultural-specific comparsion in metric units should be added for readers from overseas countries, where this confection is almost unheard of. The article on marshmallow at this moment does not give an answer, therefore I ask: How many centimetres is an average piece of it? --Miaow Miaow (talk) 22:31, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

  Done - A marshmallow ≈20 cm³. BatteryIncluded (talk) 00:01, 7 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

It could be just a trick of the perspective, but the two MARDI shots do not appear to be of the same instrument. The upright photo appears to be of a longer basic instrument, with a wider barrel. If it's wrong, it would be nice if they didn't sit there, mislabeled for years. In this, I'm noticing that the sources are not the same. Leptus Froggi (talk) 23:33, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

I think we can mention this somewhere in the article NASA and Microsoft released one small step for gamers. "Mars Rover Landing" is a free downloadable game on Xbox Live that uses body motions and Kinect for the Xbox 360 to simulate the "seven minutes of terror" landing sequence. http://www.newsday.com/business/technology/warp-pipe-1.1521604/mars-rover-landing-with-kinect-for-the-xbox-360-1.3886958 -Abhishikt (talk) 23:37, 6 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

2012 Olympic doodle, the UPDATED one, behind the javelin thrower, you can see Curiosity. Could this be a "popular culture" item? Javelin is somewhat fitting.  :) https://www.google.com/logos/2012/javelin-2012-hp.jpg

Flightsoffancy (talk) 02:26, 7 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

Article says that the power supply is suppused to last ~14 yrs but I didn't see anything about how long they are expecting the rover itself to continue operating.

The rover is designed to last 1 Martian year (668 Mars days a.k.a. sols) That's 686 days on Earth or about 2 years. This information is in the infobox for the Curiosity rover and the Mars Science Laboratory articles. Cheers. 64.40.54.57 (talk) 08:47, 7 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

There are multiple forms of the word Mars in the possessive form being used within the article. Here is a quick refresher from the Wikipedia Manual of Style: MOS:POSS.

Traditionally, one might use Mars' when denoting a possessive form of a noun which ends with an "s". However, the verbal pronunciation of "Mars" can seem to end with a "z" sound, which then places it in the category of an exception to the possessives rules. If a possessive noun ends with an "s" which, when pronounced, makes a "z" sound, the form, Mars's might be used, even though some people might find that word awkward. The best solution for consistency within the article, as various editors continue to contribute, would seem to be to skip the use of inanimate possessive nouns altogether, by rephrasing the sentence to include,of Mars.

• Mars' equator = commonly viewed as correct

• Mars's equator = technically correct for verbal pronunciation, but less desirable in written form

• The equator of Mars (the avoidance of inanimate possessive nouns) = most desirable in both verbal and written form

While this isn't quite as important as other aspects of the article, it can be distracting to see multiple variations used, so anyway, there it is for new editors. OliverTwisted^(Talk)(Stuff) 07:46, 7 August 2012 (UTC) Reply