DescentBB

On Monday Mars will have a new visitor. Wish her luck:

"The $2.5bn mission is due to touch down at 05:31 GMT (06:31 BST) Monday 6 August; 22:31 PDT, Sunday 5 August."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19107577

Would be an awful waste of money for something to go wrong, so here's hoping it doesn't!

touchdown on Mars in only 35 minutes from now

...or a heartbreaking explosion hahaha. Either way we'll be crying nerdy tears :]

- Live feed at http://www.nasa.gov/mars
or (2nd link is prettymuch JUST control room cam, not as good)
- Realtime computer visualisation of what's happening right now (this is pretty good! it counts down all the separation stages and everything) http://eyes.nasa.gov
(if anyone can figure out howto change the mph stuff on that page into SI units, i'm all ears)

to borrow a line from marvin the martian... "where's the kaboom?"

yay! touchdown.

OMFG

TOUCHDOWN CONFIRMED

IT ALL WORKED

imagery comming in already. That's a pic of the wheel on mars

lol

Curiosity Lands
Twitter Crashes

lol nice.

nasa gets its math right, and twitter can't deal with something like this. awesome.

woot woot

This topic has something like two of those times I'd have used a "like" button on posts.

Woke up this morning to the good news. What I like about this rover is it being able to search for life. With a 2 year operational life span we should hopefully see some interesting stuff.
Also kudos to all the engineers that designed both Curiosity and the landing vehicle. A flying crane! Who'd of thunk it.

Edit:
Just watched the 7 minutes of terror vid and I'm singularly impressed with the technical variables needed to land Curiosity and how they all worked:

http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/

And yet, where Kim Kardashian ate lunch yesterday was bigger news than this. Crazy to think about all the different things that had to work in perfect order and they all did...

Twitter was flooded quickly last night.

Not mine.. from reddit...

Hmmm. Looks like Wheatley took over Curiosity. Mwaaaaaaahaaaaahaaaaa! We're doomed!

roid wrote:Curiosity Lands
Twitter Crashes
... to/1/large

Still down.

Sure glad it made it. I'm looking forward to more high resolution pictures. I wonder where the sky crane ended up?

(ps: TC that link (which your copypaste broke btw) was to a screengrab of twitter being down )


none of the CG dramatisations i've seen of the rover landing have ever shown the Crane's inevitable crash landing. It just rockets off into the distance - outof sight outof mind, then the film's focus is back on the rover.
But the crane IS designed to crash a safe distance away, it has nothing useful onboard. Shame really.

I'm guessing NASA's PR goons didn't want a crash on people's minds, so they recommended against it's inclusion in internally (NASA) produced dramatisations. Personally i think it could of be included (particularly in that dun-dun dun style "7 minutes of terror" dramatisation) as it would really hit home the reality of the danger involved, and the violence they are up against.

But then i realise i'm critiquing a 5 minute NASA video...
Back to stirring my chocolate pudding, coz i've lost control of my life

Glowhyena wrote:Twitter was flooded quickly last night.

which now turns into:

"nasa can figure out how to land a rover on mars and they still can't get twitter to work right"

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/
(raw image feed still broken, likely being slashdotted)

hehe
http://www.xkcd.com/1091/ hmm... i wonder.

ahahahaha
http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=CURIOS ... D-aXXo.jpg

AHHAHAHA the internet's vast network of porn distribution saves the day!

I think Wheatley had a blue eye? That might be Mr. Spaaaaaaaace.

I thought so at first too, but it's actually the Curiosity Core from the first Portal, which kind of makes more sense.

OOPSIE

1 outta 2 tries ain't bad, especially since the one that worked was on Mars.

HAHAHA

Can't unsee...

Ha ha, nice one! XD

I approve.

Sweet.

The Descent and Landing

tunnelcat wrote:Sweet.

The Descent and Landing

Thank you for sharing! The video is cool!

I wished they'd had a shot looking up at the sky crane too. It would have been fascinating to see the parachutes in action and then the release of those hanging cables tethering the sky crane to the robot.

They should have put a mirror on the heat shield, so when it fell off we'd get a glimpse of it... Better yet, they should have dropped a predator drone to shoot the whole thing, then bomb mars. Terrorist mars...

I can't believe they used this method and material to tie stuff down on the rover. I guess if it works for ships........ That begs the question, is this hold down material even mil spec, or space spec as it were?

http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-knots-kee ... 41222.html

You don’t want to know what they do with duct tape.