Crazy Mars landing (or crash) tonight (sunday)

[gerti]

They'll slam a craft carrying a small car sized rover into the atmosphere. While the heat shield heats up to toasty four-digit temps, maneuvering jets will fire to bring the craft on target.

Then the largest ever build super-sonic parachute will be deployed and the heat shield jettisoned. Once the speed is down to a couple hundred mph, the chute and upper shell will be cut loose.

Next rockets will fire to slow the craft down, until it eventually hovers over the surface. Next the actual rover will be lowered using cables. Once it touches down, the cables will be cut, the rocket crane flies away, and the rover is finally at it's destination after an 8.5 months journey.

Or there is a new heap of smoldering radioactive scrap somewhere on Mars.

The whole descent will take about 7 minutes. And we'll know if it worked or not another 7 minutes later, because Mars is 7 light/radio minutes away.

Want to watch? NASA TV:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on the surface of Mars on Aug. 5 at 10:31 p.m. PDT (1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6; 0531 GMT).

Don't miss it!

Gerd

[chopnhack]

The channel says coverage starts at 11PM, as in 5 minutes bahh.... just watched a preview 10:31 PDT... too late for me. Astronomy has always been at such odd hours :-)

[cabinetman]

The channel says coverage starts at 11PM, as in 5 minutes bahh.... just watched a preview 10:31 PDT... too late for me. Astronomy has always been at such odd hours :-)

I missed it too. Watched the Olympics.

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[gerti]

I missed it too. Watched the Olympics.
.

It hasn't happened yet! Another two hours.

[chopnhack]

LOL, WillIam was at JPL promoting his new schools. What an awesome performer... great to see a musician of his stature promoting school!

[TB Roye]

9:30pm on west coast, suppose to start down in about 90min

Tom

[gerti]

They did it!!!

They did it!!!

First photos were received to thanks to Odyssey overhead during the landing.

Truly amazing!

[LCHIEN]

congratulations to the JPL teams that made this engineering feat reality. It was very bold, incorporating a combination of techniques never used together before. All iffy by themselves when used before in mars landings. A high risk, high gain proposition. New hardware and 500,000 lines of software, some of which there was no way to test before hand. Looks like it pulled off without a hitch. Off to bed for me now.

American know-how is the best!

[cabinetman]

Forgot about time zone programming. I'll have to watch a rerun.

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[dbhost]

Congratulations to the team at JPL! That simply rocked! Now get to some exploring!

[jackellis]

I like simple but the little I know about how they did this suggests it qualifies for the Rube Goldberg award. Still, they pulled it off and for that I am very pleased.

Someone sent me a "first photo" that was actually an old image from one of the other Mars missions with an alien photoshopped on the side as if he was peeking in.

[Mildoc]

Attended a watch party at the local planetarium. Place went WILD! Great time for all!

[gsmittle]

WOO HOO!!!!!!

I love this stuff! I tell ya, if NASA ever sends somebody with no marketable skills who can't do math into space, I'm their guy!

g.

[jackellis]

I tell ya, if NASA ever sends somebody with no marketable skills who can't do math into space, I'm their guy!

I hate to break the news but I believe all of the astronauts have at least a Master's degree in science or engineering. Which requires lots of heavy duty math. As in calculus and statistics.

[TB Roye]

Did you notice the difference between the college people (JPL) and how the NASA Huston and the Cape crowd reacted to their successes. The JPL people acted like college kids, where NASA shows very little emotion. It was fun watching and see the excitement when the rover landed. Only JPL could pull something like that off. Years ago the students used to get into the Rose Bowl before the game and reset all the card trick instruction to spell entirely different things that was planned.

Tom