Mission to Mars: With rover landed, Yingst’s work is just beginning

You’ve no doubt heard that the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity — so intense and complex it was dubbed the “seven minutes of terror” — was a success early Monday (Aug. 6) morning, with NASA and the larger scientific community at once relieved with the landing’s outcome and excited about the mission’s possibilities. Green Bay’s own R. Aileen Yingst, director of the campus-headquartered Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium, continues to be in the thick of the action in Pasadena, preparing to use the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera to obtain the first color image from the red planet’s surface. We spoke to Yingst midday Monday, obtaining a firsthand account of the landing and what’s next for the mission. You can read all about it below, where we’ve also linked to a couple of pre-landing stories, from WLUK, Fox 11 and Wisconsin Public Radio:
UW-Green Bay News
WLUK Fox 11
Wisconsin Public Radio