The Curiosity Mars rover, stepping through a complex post-landing checklist in near flawless fashion, successfully raised its main camera mast and beamed down razor-sharp navigation camera views of its surroundings in Gale Crater that provide a hint of the spectacular vistas to come when the craft's high-resolution cameras swing into operation, engineers said Wednesday.
Mission manager Jennifer Trosper said the only anomaly of any significance since landing overnight Sunday -- trouble with a meteorological instrument -- turned out to be a procedural glitch and not a real problem at all. Along with erecting the remote sensing mast, Curiosity's high-gain antenna, which follows Earth across the martian sky to provide a direct communications link, was deployed and checked out after minor alignment issues were resolved. The high-gain antenna can be used to receive critical commands when two NASA satellites.
The Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are below the horizon."We accomplished the main things of getting our high gain antenna session to work and we have now confirmed that all of our antennas and all of our links on the rover work perfectly," Trosper said. "We feel very confident that we have lots of data capacity now with all of these links. That was one of the major objectives of this first part of the mission, so that's fantastic."
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