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Phoenix Mars Lander To Touch Down In 2 Hours
AFP has a good summary of the pre-touchdown jitters the Phoenix Mars Lander crew is living through. The spacecraft has been under way for 10 months. If the landing goes according to plan — and only about half of the three dozen such attempts have — mission controllers at the University of Arizona will receive radio signals from the Martian surface at 23:53 GMT. Here's the Mars mission home. You can (in theory) track the lander here, but at the moment the JPL Solar System Simulator is "experiencing technical difficulties."
A buddy of mine once said it would've been cool to put a little mini-web server on the Spirit rover.
Latency aside, can you imagine what would have happened if they had done so and someone posted the URL to /.?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Way to go guys, we slashdotted Mars!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Is that Imperial hours or metric hours?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
The broadcast feels like a mix between a science lecture and coverage of a sporting event, which is pretty neat. As in sports, I'm cheering on the efforts of supremely talented people to score a goal. Rather than a football in an end zone, it's a lander on the northern plains of Mars. The difference here is that victory will actually mean something for mankind.
Go Earth! Get those Martians!