NASA rover Curiosity makes historic Mars landing, beams back photos

 NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity performed a daredevil descent through pink Martian skies late on Sunday to clinch an historic landing inside an ancient crater, ready to search for signs the Red Planet may once have harbored key ingredients for life.
Mission controllers burst into applause and cheers as they received signals confirming that the car-sized rover had survived a perilous seven-minute descent NASA called the most elaborate and difficult feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.
Engineers said the tricky landing sequence, combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether, allowed for zero margin for error.
"I can't believe this. This is unbelievable," enthused Allen Chen, the deputy head of the rover's descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.
Moments later, Curiosity beamed back its first three images from the Martian surface, one of them showing a wheel of the vehicle and the rover's shadow cast on the rocky terrain.
NASA put the official landing time of Curiosity, touted as the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory sent to a distant world, at 10:32 p.m. Pacific time (1:32 a.m. EDT/0532 GMT).
The landing marked a much-welcome success and a major milestone for a U.S. space agency beset by budget cuts and the recent cancellation of its space shuttle program, NASA's centerpiece for 30 years.
The $2.5 billion Curiosity project, formally called the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.
"It's an enormous step forward in planetary exploration. Nobody has ever done anything like this," said John Holdren, the top science advisor to President Barack Obama, who was visiting JPL for the event. "It was an incredible performance."
Obama himself issued a statement hailing the Curiosity landing as "an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future."
"It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination," he said.

Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover Animation

Our galaxy to hit another in four billion years

WASHINGTON: Our galaxy is on a collision course with its nearest neighbor, Andromeda, and the head-on crash is expected in four billion years, the US space agency NASA said on Thursday.
Astronomers have long theorized that a clash of these galaxy titans was on the way, though it was unknown how severe it might be, or when, with guesses ranging from three to six billion years.
But years of “extraordinarily precise observations” from NASA’s Hubble Space telescope tracking the motion of the Andromeda galaxy “remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way,” NASA said in a statement.
“It will take four billion years before the strike.”
After the initial impact it will take another two billion years for them “to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe,” NASA added.The stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they are not likely to collide with each other, but stars will likely be “thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center.”
Scientists have long known that Andromeda, also known as M31, is moving toward the Milky Way at a speed of 250,000 miles per hour, or fast enough to travel from the Earth to the Moon in one hour.
But the nature of the crash depended on the galaxy’s sideways motion in the sky, and that trajectory remained a mystery for more than 100 years until the latest analysis of Hubble’s findings were revealed.
“This was accomplished by repeatedly observing select regions of the galaxy over a five- to seven-year period,” said Jay Anderson of Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Andromeda was first spotted as “a little cloud” by the Persian astronomer Abd-al-Rahman Al Sufi in 964.
“In the worst-case-scenario simulation, M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits,” said Gurtina Besla of Columbia University in New York.
“The stellar populations of both galaxies are jostled, and the Milky Way loses its flattened pancake shape with most of the stars on nearly circular orbits,” Besla added.
“The galaxies’ cores merge, and the stars settle into randomized orbits to create an elliptical-shaped galaxy.”