Curiosity Lands on Mars

[jboggs]

Check out this video of the Mars landing that happened Sunday night. Blows my mind.
Makes me wonder just how many million things could have gone wrong.
The decel and landing process took 7 minutes. It takes 14 minutes for a signal to reach Earth, so it all had to be completely automatic.
Unbelievable.
Not bad for an organization that screwed up a mars landing a few years ago due to a metric/imperial conversion error!
Joe


http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/video...a_id=146903741

[Kelly_Bramble]

First image from mars...

[PinkertonD]

I stayed up to listen to it. Pretty moving stuff. Gotta be proud to be an American and an Engineer. Have to admit to a little moisture in the eye region when Chen said, "we are safely on Mars."

Very impressive, it just gave me a little chill to recall Chen's words. Either that or my Depends has sprung a leak.

Awesome result and it all only cost me $7 a year. Happy to pay. Eagerly awaiting high-res color coming soon. There was a camera pointing down (not sure what part it was mounted to) that recorded the final descent. That's gotta be awesome to see.

[jboggs]

We get the NASA channel on cable. They broadcast the control room live during the whole thing, including interviews with the Chief Engineer (can you imagine THAT job!) and other notables. It was fun trying to understand all the chatter. Most folks have no idea there were actually THREE separate spacecraft involved in that whole operation. Each one had to perform flawlessly, and did. Unbelievable. I've never seen so many excited geeks at the actual announcement. I told my wife this is what makes nerds cry, and then they showed one crying! Really glad I got to see the whole thing. If you don't get the NASA channel, I'll bet you could see the whole video on their website or on Youtube.

Have you seen the picture that Odyssey snapped of Curiosity's decent with the parachute open? Unbelievable! They said if that snap had been just one second earlier or one second later it would been just martian terrain, and the actual command code for the timing was sent 72 hours earlier!

Again - unbelievable.

[RWOLFEJR]

First image from mars...

Crack me up...!
"Being disintegrated makes me very angry..."

[PinkertonD]

We get the NASA channel on cable.

Joe,

NASA have a live feed to the Internet using UStream and of course, "Curiosity Cam."
http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl
and an audio only stream
http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2
and here is a stitched together of a bunch of still frame thumbnails...
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/video...a_id=149974611