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Spirit Rover Lands Successfully
So, as I write this, the latest word is: the Spirit rover has landed and NASA has received a signal indicating it landed right-side up (so it shouldn't have any problems in the unfolding process) and will shortly be retracting the protective airbags which kept it from splattering all over the countryside. Y'all can fill in later news in the comments below. There's a nice site with up-to-the-minute text updates.
BBC News Mars Rover Report.
Press conference here at 9:30pm PST, so in about 25 min.
Check out the live mission updates on Spaceflight Now:
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.html
I watched it on NASA TV, too. It was quite an exciting ride through entry and landing. We have the second rover landing to look forward to on January 24.
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Ah you say that, but today (January 4th) we should know if Beagle 2 is actually alive or not. As I understand it, when The Beagle goes this long without having made successful communication, it starts to transmit all the time. This, coinciding with the oribiter being in the right orbit to pick it up, should let us know whether it's ok or not.
Fingers crossed!
Although the roughly 10 minutes was longer than anyone expected the signal to be gone, it wasn't all that unusual. When NASA's DSN locked back onto the signal, it was strong. It is then that NASA learned the lander landed right-side-up and the airbags were still inflated (which is very good news). Airbag deflation, petel opening, and the first survey of the landing site is up next. We might even have our first pictures within the next 12 hours or so.
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Cool. The rover is powered by a PowerPC chip:
"The computer in each Mars Exploration Rover runs with a 32-bit Rad 6000 microprocessor, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC chip used in some models of Macintosh computers, operating at a speed of 20 million instructions per second. Onboard memory includes 128 megabytes of random access memory, augmented by 256 megabytes of flash memory and smaller amounts of other non-volatile memory, which allows the system to retain data even without power."
There is an interesting and informative entry on the NASA site regarding how much data can be transmitted back and forth between Earth and the rover:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/comm_data.html
If we assume best case scenario for the transmission potential stated there and assume the direct-to-Earth rate averages the midpoint between the stated 12000bps and 3500bps, the total daily data for a single Martian day, direct-to-Earth and orbiter relay potential combined, is on the order of 17MB. The total data for the entire mission is on the order of 1,550MB.
Of course, this has to include protocol overhead, error, and operating instructions, but it provides one quantitative, if not qualitative, answer to how much data can be retrieved by the mission. In this case, a bit more than 2 CDs worth.
The density of the atmosphere of mars is only one percent as dense as our atmosphere on earth. Due to the thin atmosphere a parachute alone is not enough to slow the craft sufficiently for a safe landing. Spirit used a parachute then retro rockets fire just above the surface to practically stop the craft. The airbags inflate and take up the small drop that is left.
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Real first image here
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
This is ridiculously low-quality, but here's a screenshot of RealPlayer's stream of NASA TV from a few minutes ago. I'll post more pictures if I get anything good, but probably the real, high-quality images will be online within the hour. The first image here is of one of the mission control computer screens showing the images downloaded, including one image of the rover itself.