LANL science team celebrates Mars landing
LANL Video
Members of the LANL and French Space Institute ChemCam science team celebrated the successful landing of the Curiosity Rover on the surface of Mars and then quickly began working toward the first-ever laser-based interrogation of Mars' geologic composition. Watch LANL's video above.Rover touches down on Mars
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists were among those gathered in Pasadena, Calif., to cheer as the Curiosity rover landed successfully on Mars on Sunday night. “I can’t describe the feeling when we realized that Curiosity had landed safely on the planet,” said LANL planetary scientist Roger Wiens, principal investigator of the Mars Science Laboratory mission’s ChemCam team, in a news statement. (Full Story)
In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the red planet’s past. A chorus of cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Sunday night after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built sent a signal to Earth. (Full Story)
Also from the Monitor this week:
NASA’s Curiosity rover on Monday transmitted a low-resolution video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the Mars atmosphere, giving Earthlings a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world. As thumbnails of the video flashed on a big screen on Monday, scientists and engineers at the NASA Jet Propulsion let out “oohs” and “aahs.” (Full Story)
High in the New Mexico desert stands a small unremarkable building. But, if you had peered through its now cobwebbed keyhole back in 1945, what you would have seen is the device that changed the world.
"The Gadget," as it was euphemistically called, was the first atomic bomb ever tested. Scientists and engineers at the Los Alamos National Lab rolled it out of the remaining barn doors some 67 years ago. (Full Story)
For a plant physiologist whose research points to a looming disaster in the world as we know it, Nate G. McDowell is a surprisingly upbeat guy. “I’m excited. This is such an awesome project,” said McDowell, a Los Alamos National Laboratory staff scientist, as he gave a tour of his latest research site near Bandelier National Monument. (Full Story)
Los Alamos National Laboratory recognized some of its stars on Thursday evening for innovations ranging from bomb-defusing tools to glow-in-the-dark proteins.
LANL honored several scientists and entrepreneurs with five awards at the LANL Tech Transfer outSTANDING innOVATION Awards for research, patents and devices. Since 1998, the laboratory has held an annual patent and licensing awards reception to honor employees who have been issued patents in the past year and received royalty income for patented and copyrighted work they did at LANL. (Full Story)
For the fourth consecutive year, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s TRU Waste Program has sent a record number of transuranic waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad for permanent disposal. The laboratory’s 172nd shipment of TRU waste this year left Los Alamos bound for WIPP Aug. 2. With two months left in the fiscal year, the laboratory has already beat last year’s fiscal year record of 171 shipments. (Full Story)
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