Start your week with some new photos from Artemis II!
Though our journey around the Moon has ended, we're still retrieving plenty of new images. Keep an eye on our Artemis II multimedia gallery for image highlights from the mission: https://t.co/XInWMJwMYY
Welcome home Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy! 🫶
The Artemis II astronauts have splashed down at 8:07pm ET (0007 UTC April 11), bringing their historic 10-day mission around the Moon to an end.
A $2.5 billion robot has been alone on another planet for 13 years and is still doing science. The scale of that sentence gets worse the longer you think about it.
Curiosity landed in August 2012. Obama was president. Instagram had 80 million users. The iPhone 5 hadn’t shipped yet. The rover was designed for a two-year mission and 20 kilometers of driving. It’s now driven 35.5 kilometers, climbed over 327 meters up the side of a mountain, drilled 46 holes into Martian rock, and is currently running its fifth mission extension.
The computer running all of this has 256 MB of RAM and a 200 MHz processor. Your AirPods have more computing power. Every command sent from Earth takes 14 minutes to arrive. Every photo sent back takes the same 14 minutes. When Curiosity drills into a rock, the team in Pasadena won’t know if it worked for half an hour. They’ve been operating on that delay, every single day, for 4,846 Martian sols.
The power source is 10.6 pounds of plutonium-238 generating about 110 watts. Less than a ceiling fan. It will keep producing electricity for decades because the half-life of Pu-238 is 87.7 years. The rover will run out of moving parts before it runs out of power.
And those wheels. Machined from single blocks of aluminum, 0.75 millimeters thick. Half a dime. JPL watched them get shredded by Martian rock starting in 2013, rerouted the entire mission path, taught the rover to drive backwards, and kept going. The wheels look like they lost a fight with a can opener. The rover is still climbing a mountain.
Every iPhone you’ve owned since 2012 is in a landfill. Curiosity is on Mars, 140 million miles from the nearest repair shop, running on a ceiling fan’s worth of nuclear power, sending data through a 14-minute time delay, on shredded wheels, doing geology that rewrites what we know about whether life ever existed somewhere other than Earth.
We built that. With 0.01% of the federal budget.
Muslims in Japan: Give us more cemetries.
Mizuho Umemura (member of the House of Councillors of Japan): No more cemeteries would be given. You already have enough. In Japan, cremation is the tradition. The correct approach is to return the body of the deceased person to their countries and bury them there.
Japan has successfully defeated land grabbing.
We're hosting a live event on Wednesday, Nov. 19 to share the latest images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, collected by several NASA missions.
Tune in for the details—and send in your questions for the livestream with #AskNASA: https://t.co/vcFamtcjK2